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THE NEW SCIENCE OF GIAMBATTISTA VICO
THE NEW SCIENCE OF
GIAMBATTISTA VICO
Translated from the third edition (1744) by
THOMAS GODDARD BERGIN
AND MAX HAROLD FISCH
Cornell University Press
ITHACA, NEW YORK, 1948
Copyright 1948 by Cornell University
Cornell University Press
London: Geoffrey Cumberlege
Oxford University Press
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE
VAIL-BALLOU PREbS, INC,, BINGHAM1ON, NEW YORK
To ROBERT MORRIS OGDEN
AND GEORGE HOLLAND SABINE
PREFACE
THE FOLLOWING translation of Vico's Scienza nuova, begun in 1939 at Naples
and on Capri but interrupted by the war, is based on the text edited by Fausto
Nicolini which forms volume 112 and the first 166 pages of volume 113 in the
Scrittori d'ltalia (Bari, Laterza, 1928).
That text was based on a word-for-word collation of Nicolini's earlier edition
of 191 1-16 with the edition of 1744 and with the manuscript in Vico's hand from
which the latter was printed. Vico's intolerably long paragraphs and sentences
were broken up and the punctuation was otherwise modernized. His countless
parenthetical phrases and clauses were enclosed in curved lines to clarify the
syntax. The paragraphs were numbered, and the index references were to
paragraphs rather than pages.
We have retained Nicolini's paragraphing, and our index, like his, refers to
the paragraphs by number; but we have carried the breaking up of sentences
much further. With occasional exceptions, we have followed Nicolini's use of
parenthesis marks, but the reader should perhaps be warned that they are no
part of Vico's own punctuation.
Our thanks are due to William Cherubini for placing at our disposal his trans-
lation of paragraphs 365-445, to James Hutton for his careful and helpful
scrutiny of our entire translation in the typescript, to Ruth B. Fisch for pre-
paring the index, and to the University of Chicago Library for supplying a
photograph of the plate facing page 3 from its copy of the edition of 1744.
For a discussion of the development of the New Science, of its background
in European thought, and of its subsequent influence, we may refer the reader
to the introduction to our translation of Vico's Autobiography (Cornell Uni-
versity Press, Ithaca, 1944). It was our intention, as we stated in the preface to
that volume, that that somewhat lengthy introduction should serve for our
translation of the New Science as well. 1
Two indispensable aids to the scholarly study of Vico have appeared or been
announced since the present translation was completed. Croce's Bibliografia
vichiana has been enlarged and rewritten by Nicolini (Naples, Ricciardi, 2
1 The essay promised in note 147 of our translation of the Autobiography is appearing
under the title "The Academy of the Investigators'* in a volume of essays in honor of the
English historian of science, Charles Singer.
viii PREFACE
vols., 1947-48), and Nicolini has in press a definitive commentary on the
Scienza nuova (Bari, Laterza, 2 vols., 1948).
Vico's argument touches so many fields which have been assiduously culti-
vated since his day (the Homeric question and the general field of folklore for
examples) that it is difficult to resist the temptation to annotate the New Science
in the light of subsequent investigations. But Nicolini's commentary will take
care of the needs of scholars in this and other respects, and a commentary would
be only a distraction to most of the readers we hope our translation will have.
We have therefore chosen to publish it without notes.
A general caveat, however, should perhaps be entered here. The New Science
abounds in confusions, misquotations and misinterpretations of Vico's sources,
arising in part from taking them at second hand, in larger part from unconscious
reading of his own views into them, and in still larger part from simply mis-
remembering them. A few of the resulting errors have been indicated in the
index and by bracketed insertions in the text. For examples, Vico remembers
Arion as Amphion, makes a proper noun out of an adjective in Homer (see
index s.v. Eureia), adds Pacca to the name of the troubadour poet Arnaut
Daniel, confuses Kronos and chronos, attributes to Thucydides what was said
by Isocrates, and alters beyond recognition the meaning of a passage in Seneca
(at the end of paragraph 1096). A complete exposure of Vico's errors in this
kind would require the elaborate commentary which we have foregone, and
yet would not touch the heart of his argument. 2 Our general caveat seems there-
fore sufficient.
Readers new to Vico may find it advantageous on their first reading of
the New Science to pass over the "Idea of the Work" and the "Notes on the
Chronological Table" and begin with the "Elements" (Book I, Section II).
To smooth the way of readers with little Latin and less Greek, we have
transliterated the Greek words and phrases in Vico's text, and have usually
inserted translations of these and of his Latin words, phrases and quotations.
For the literary works he cites, we have often used familiar English titles in
the case of Greek and Latin classics; but in the case of modern works we have
usually given the title in the language of original publication (Latin for the
most part), even when Vico gives an Italian translation or paraphrase. Minor
errors in the citations have been silently corrected.
At the expense of occasional awkwardness, we have tried to respect Vice's
technical terms. Certo and its cognates, for example, arc with rare exceptions
translated "certain" etc., even when it is not clear that Vico is using them in the
technical sense explained in paragraph 321. Umano and its cognates, which we
were often tempted to render "humane" or "civilized," are usually allowed to
stand as "human" etc., in order to preserve a possible reference either (a) to the
2 In addition to Nicolini's forthcoming commentary, the curious reader may consult his
Fonti e rifcrimcnti storici dell a scconda Scienza Nuova (Bari, Laterza, 1931)1 and the
notes to his 1911-^6 edition.
PREFACE ix
age of men as distinguished from the age of gods and the age of heroes, or (b)
to the ages of heroes and men together as distinguished from the age of gods,
as in paragraph 629. An ctcrna propictd remains an "eternal property" even
when we are tempted to employ the more secular language of uniformities and
correlations. Principio we have sometimes rendered "principle," sometimes "be-
ginning." As a technical term with Vico, it means both in one, and it may
fairly be said that the ambivalence of this term is one of the keys to Vico's
thought. The term principc, "prince," has the same ambivalence, and so does
natura, "nature" or "birth." Dominio (Latin dominlum) we have usually trans-
lated "ownership," but sometimes "dominion" or (in the phrase dominio
eminente) "domain." Rcpubblica is uniformly rendered "commonwealth" to
avoid the misleading associations of "republic" in English. A few terms for
which there are no exact English equivalents are represented by the correspond-
ing Latin terms, as likely to be less unfamiliar: connubio by connubium, famoli
by famuli, suitd by sui heredcs etc. Diritto naturalc delle genti we have usually
rendered "the natural law of nations" since "law of nations" is the common
English equivalent for ius gentium?
In general, apart from the breaking up of sentences and an occasional lapse
from Italian superlatives into English positives, or from literal translation into
paraphrase for clarity's sake, we have aimed at as close an approximation to
Vico's style as English will permit. A recent critic * has argued that Vico is more
poet than philosopher, and that his style is essential to the full communication
of his meaning. Perhaps it would not overstrain the point to say that he is even
more prophet than poet, and that his language, with all its obscurity, incoherence
and magnificence, is the language of one who beholds a vision. Indeed the fre-
quent "as we have already seen" and "as we shall soon see" betray the essential
characteristic of the seer. The vision is forever with him in all its dazzling totality;
it is a scintillant whole though with many facets, and Vico even while enraptured
by one aspect of his revelation is never unaware of the others. His references
forwards and backwards connect primarily the parts of the vision, and only
secondarily and imperfectly the parts of the book. 5 Not to attempt to convey
something of this divine or at least heroic intoxication would be to fail to
translate Vico in any real sense of the word.
T. G. B.
M. H. F.
Ithaca and Urbana, April 1948
8 For the meaning of this portmanteau phrase see paragraph 998 below and page 48 of
the introduction to our translation of Vico's Autobiography.
4 Mario Fubini, Stile e umanttb dt Giambattista Vico, Bari, Laterza, 1946.
8 We have inserted paragraph numbers in brackets for all backward references to the
Axioms, and for a very few other backward and forward references.
CONTENTS
IDEA OF THE WORK
Frontispiece facing page 3
Explanation of the Picture Placed as Frontispiece to Serve as Introduction
to the Work 3
BOOK ONE: ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES
Chronological Table facing page 27
Section I. Notes on the Chronological Table, in Which the Materials
Are Set in Order 27
Section II. Elements 54
Section III. Principles 85
Section IV. Method 89
BOOK TWO: POETIC WISDOM
Prolegomena 97
Introduction 97
Chapter I. Wisdom in General 98
Chapter II. Exposition and Division of Poetic Wisdom 100
Chapter III. The Universal Flood and the Giants 100
Section I. Poetic Metaphysics 104
Chapter I. Poetic Metaphysics as the Origin of Poetry, Idolatry, Divina-
tion and Sacrifices 104
Chapter II. Corollaries concerning the Principal Aspects of This Science 108
Section II. Poetic Logic 114
Chapter I. Poetic Logic 114
Chapter II. Corollaries concerning Poetic Tropes, Monsters and Meta-
morphoses 116
Chapter III. Corollaries concerning Speech by Poetic Characters among
the First Nations 119
xii CONTENTS
Chapter IV. Corollaries concerning the Origins of Languages and Let-
ters; and, Therein, the Origins of Hieroglyphics, Laws, Names,
Family Arms, Medals and Money; and Hence of the First Lan-
guage and Literature of the Natural Law of Nations 124
Chapter V. Corollaries concerning the Origins of Poetic Style, Episode,
Inversion, Rhythm, Song and Verse 138
Chapter VI. The Other Corollaries Announced at the Beginning [of
Chapter IV] 143
Chapter VII. Final Corollaries concerning the Logic of the Learned 149
Section III. Poetic Morals 152
Chapter I. Poetic Morals and the Origins of the Vulgar Virtues Taught
by Religion through the Institution of Matrimony 152
Section IV. Poetic Economy 160
Chapter I. Of Poetic Economy, and Here of the Families Which at
first Included Only Children [and not Famuli} 160
Chapter II. The Families with Their Famuli, Which Preceded the
Cities, and without Which the Cities Could Not Have Been Born 175
Chapter III. Corollaries concerning Contracts Sealed by Simple Con-
sent 183
Chapter IV. Mythological Canon 185
Section V. Poetic Politics 187
Chapter I. Poetic Politics, under Which the First Commonwealths in
the World Were Born in a Most Severely Aristocratic Form 187
Chapter II. All Commonwealths Are Born from Certain Eternal Prin-
ciples of Fiefs 196
Chapter III. The Origins of the Census and the Treasury 205
Chapter IV. The Origins of the Roman Assemblies 207
Chapter V. Corollary: Divine Providence Is the Ordainer of Common-
wealths and at the Same Time of the Natural Law of Nations 209
Chapter VI. Heroic Politics 212
Chapter VII. Corollaries concerning Roman Antiquities, and in Par-
ticular the Supposedly Monarchic Kingship at Rome and the Sup-
posedly Popular Liberty Ordained by Junius Brutus 222
Chapter VIII. Corollary concerning the Heroism of the First Peoples 224
Section VI 229
Chapter I. Epitomes of Poetic History 229
Section VII. Poetic Physics 232
Chapter I. Poetic Physics 232
Chapter II. P0etic Physics concerning Man, or Heroic Nature 234
CONTENTS xiii
Chapter III, Corollary on Heroic Sentences 237
Chapter IV. Corollary on Heroic Descriptions 238
Chapter V. Corollary on Heroic Customs 239
Section VIII 240
Chapter I. Poetic Cosmography 240
Section IX. Poetic Astronomy 246
Chapter I. Poetic Astronomy 246
Chapter II. Astronomical and Physico-philological Demonstration of
the Uniformity of the Principles [of Astronomy] among All An-
cient Gentile Nations 246
Section X. Poetic Chronology 249
Chapter I. Poetic Chronology 249
Chapter II. Chronological Canon for Determining the Beginnings of
Universal History, Which Must Precede the Monarchy of Ninus,
with Which It [Commonly] Starts 251
Section XL Poetic Geography 254
Chapter I. Poetic Geography 254
Chapter II. Corollary on the Coming of Aeneas into Italy 260
Chapter III. The Denomination and Description of the Heroic Cities 262
Conclusion 265
BOOK THREE: DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER
Section I. Search for the True Homer 269
Introduction 269
Chapter I. The Esoteric Wisdom Attributed to Homer 269
Chapter II. Homer's Fatherland 272
Chapter III. The Age of Homer 273
Chapter IV. Homer's Matchless Faculty for Heroic Poetry 276
Chapter V. Philosophical Proofs for the Discovery of the True Homer 278
Chapter VI. Philological Proofs for the Discovery of the True Homer 283
Section II. Discovery of the True Homer 289
Introduction 289
Chapter I. The Improprieties and Improbabilities of the Homer Hith-
erto Believed in Become Proper and Necessary in the Homer
Herein Discovered 289
Chapter II. The Poems of Homer Revealed as Two Great Treasure
Stores of the Natural Law of the Nations of Greece 293
Appendix. Rational History of the Dramatic and Lyric Poets 395
xiv CONTENTS
BOOK FOUR: THE COURSE OF NATIONS
Introduction 301
Section I. Three Kinds of Natures 302
Section II. Three Kinds of Customs 303
Section HI, Three Kinds of Natural Law 304
Section IV. Three Kinds of Governments 305
Section V. Three Kinds of Languages 306
Section VI. Three Kinds of Characters 307
Section VIL Three Kinds of Jurisprudence 309
Section VIII. Three Kinds of Authority 311
Section IX. Three Kinds of Reason 313
Chapter I. Divine Reason and Reason of State 313
Chapter II. Corollary on the Political Wisdom of the Ancient Romans 314
Chapter HI. Corollary: Fundamental History of Roman Law 315
Section X. Three Kinds of Judgments 317
Chapter I. First Kind: Divine Judgments 317
Chapter II. Corollary on Duels and Reprisals 319
Chapter III. Second Kind: Ordinary Judgments 321
Chapter IV. Third Kind: Human Judgments 324
Section XL Three Sects of Times 325
Chapter I. Sects of Religious, Punctilious and Civil Times 325
Section XII. Other Proofs Drawn from the Properties of the Heroic
Aristocracies 327
Introduction 327
Chapter I. The Safeguarding of the Frontiers 327
Chapter II. The Safeguarding of the Orders 329
Chapter III, The Safeguarding of the Laws 335
Section XIII 338
Chapter I. Other Proofs Taken from [Mixed Commonwealths, that
is from] the Tempering of the State of a Succeeding Common-
wealth by the Government of the Preceding One 338
Chapter II. An Eternal Natural Royal Law by Which the Nations
Come to Rest under Monarchies 340
Chapter III. Refutation of the Principles of Political Theory as Rep-
resented by the System of Jean Bodin 341
Section XIV. Final Proofs to Confirm the Course of Nations 345
Chapter I. Punishments, Wars, Order of Numbers 345
CONTENTS xv
Chapter II. Corollary: That the Ancient Roman Law Was a Serious
Poem, and the Ancient Jurisprudence a Severe Kind of Poetry,
within Which Are Found the First Outlines of Legal Metaphysics
in the Rough; and How, among the Greeks, Philosophy Was Born
of the Laws 347
BOOK FIVE: THE RECURRENCE OF HUMAN THINGS IN THE
RESURGENCE OF THE NATIONS
Introduction 357
Chapter I. The Latest Barbaric History Illuminated by the Recurrence of
the First Barbaric History 357
Chapter II. Recurrence of the Nations in Conformity with the Eternal
Nature of Fiefs, and Recurrence of Ancient Roman Law in Feudal Law 360
Chapter HI. The Ancient and Modern World of Nations Described in
Conformity with the Plan of the Principles of This [New] Science 370
CONCLUSION OF THE WORK
On an Eternal Natural Commonwealth, in Each Kind Best, Ordained
by Divine Providence 377
Index of Names 385
THE NEW SCIENCE OF GIAMBATTISTA VICO
IDEA OF THE WORK
EXPLANATION OF THE PICTURE
PLACED AS FRONTISPIECE
TO SERVE AS INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK
1 AS CEDES the Theban made a table of things moral, we here offer one
of things civil. We hope it may serve to give the reader some conception of this
work before he reads it, and, with such aid as imagination may afford, to call
it back to mind after he has read it,
2 The lady with the winged temples who surmounts the celestial globe
or world of nature is metaphysic, for the name means as much. The luminous
triangle with the seeing eye is God with the aspect of His providence. Through
this aspect metaphysic in the attitude of ecstasy contemplates Him above the
order of natural things through which hitherto the philosophers have contem-
plated Him. For in the present work, ascending higher, she contemplates in
God the world of human minds, which is the metaphysical world, in order to
show His providence in the world of human spirits, which is the civil world or
world of nations. The latter has as the elements of which it is formed all the
things represented by the hieroglyphs displayed in the lower half of the picture.
The globe, or the physical, natural world, is supported by the altar in one part
only, for, until now, the philosophers, contemplating divine providence only
through the natural order, have shown only a part of it. Accordingly rnen offer
worship, sacrifices and other divine honors to God as to the Mind which is
the free and absolute sovereign of nature, because by His eternal counsel He
has given us existence through nature, and through nature preserves it to us.
But the philosophers have not yet contemplated His providence in respect of
that part of it which is most proper to men, whose nature has this principal
property: that of being social. In providing for this property God has so or-
dained and disposed human affairs that men, having fallen from complete
justice by original sin, and while intending almost always to do something quite
different and often quite the contrary so that for private utility they would live
alone like wild beasts have been led by this same utility and along the afore-
said different and contrary paths to live like men in justice and to keep them-
selves in society and thus to observe their social nature. It will be shown in the
4 THE NEW SCIENCE
present work that this is the true civil nature of man, and thus that law exists
in nature. The conduct of divine providence in this matter is one of the things
whose rationale is a chief business of our Science, which becomes in this re-
spect a rational civil theology of divine providence.
3 In the belt of the zodiac which girds the celestial globe the two signs
of Leo and Virgo, more than the others, appear in majesty, or, as is said, in per-
spective. The former signifies that our Science in its beginnings contemplates first
the Hercules that every ancient gentile nation boasts as its founder, and that it
contemplates him in his greatest labor. This was the slaying of the lion which,
vomiting flame, set fire to the Nemean forest, and adorned with whose skin
Hercules was raised to the stars. The lion is here found to have been the great
ancient forest of the earth, burned down and brought under cultivation by
Hercules, whom we find to have been the type of the political heroes who had
to precede the military heroes. This sign also represents the beginning of
time [-reckoning ]s, which among the Greeks (to whom we owe all our knowl-
edge of gentile antiquity) began with the Olympiads, based on the games of
which we are told that Hercules was the founder. They must have begun among
the Nemeans to celebrate his victory over the lion he slew. Thus the
time [ -reckoning ]s of the Greeks began when cultivation of the fields began
among them. The second sign, that of the Virgin, whom the astronomers found
described by the poets as crowned with ears of grain, signifies that Greek his-
tory began with the golden age. The poets expressly relate that this was the
first age of their world, when through the long course of centuries the years
were counted by the grain harvests, which we find to have been the first gold
of the world. This golden age of the Greeks has its Latin counterpart in the
age of Saturn, who gets his name from sati, "sown" [fields]. In this age of
gold, the poets assure us faithfully, the gods consorted on earth with the heroes.
For we shall show later that the first men among the gentiles, simple and crude,
and under the powerful spell of most vigorous imaginations encumbered with
frightful superstitions, actually believed that they saw the gods on earth. We
shall see further that by uniformity of ideas the orientals, Egyptians, Greeks and
Latins, each in ignorance of the others, afterwards raised the gods to the planets
and the heroes to the fixed stars. Thus from Saturn (whose Greek name Chronos
means "time") new principles are derived for chronology or the theory of time.
4 You must not think it improper that the altar is under and supports
the globe. For it will be found that the world's first altars were raised by the
gentiles in the first heaven of the poets, who in their fables faithfully passed on
to us the story that Heaven had reigned on earth over men and had left great
blessings to mankind. These first men, children as it were of the growing hu-
man race, believed that the sky was no higher than the summits of the moun-
tains, as even now children believe it to be little higher than the roofs of their
houses. Then as the Greek intelligence developed heaven was raised to the
summits of the highest mountains, such as Olympus, where Homer relates that
IDEA OF THE WORK 5
the gods of his day had their dwelling. Finally it was raised above the spheres,
as we are now taught by astro ^my, and Olympus was raised above the heaven
of the fixed stars. Thither lik wdse was transported the altar, which is now a
celestial sign, and the fire upo.i it passed into the neighboring house (as you
see here) of the Lion. (This, as we have just observed, was the Nemean forest,
to which Hercules set fire to bring it under cultivation.) For the lion's skin was
raised to the stars in token of the triumph of Hercules.
5 The ray of the divine providence illuminating a convex jewel which
adorns the breast of metaphysic denotes the clean and pure heart .vhich meta-
physic must have, not dirty or befouled with pride of spirit or vileness of bodily
pleasures, by the first of which Zeno was led to put fate, and by the second
Epicurus to put chance, in the place of divine providence. Furthermore it in-
dicates that the knowledge of God does not have its end in ir etaphysic taking
private illumination from intellectual things and thence regulating merely her
own moral conduct, as hitherto the philosophers have done. For this would have
been signified by a flat jewel, whereas the jewel is convex, thus reflecting and
scattering the ray abroad, to show that metaphysic should know God's provi-
dence in public morals or civil customs, by which the nations have come into
being and maintain themselves in the world.
6 The same ray is reflected from the breast of metaphysic onto the statue
of Homer, the first gentile author who has come down to us. For metaphysic,
directing a history of human ideas from the beginnings of truly human think-
ing among the gentiles, has enabled us finally to descend into the crude minds of
the first founders of the gentile nations, all robust sense and vast imagination.
They had only the bare potentiality, and that torpid and stupid, of using the
human mind and reason. For that very reason the beginnings of poetry, not
only different from but contrary to those which have been hitherto imagined, are
found to lie in the beginnings of poetic wisdom, which have for that same
reason been hitherto hidden from us. This poetic wisdom, the knowledge of
the theological poets, was unquestionably the first wisdom of the world for the
gentiles. The statue of Homer on a cracked base signifies the discovery of the
true Homer. (In the first edition of the New Science we sensed it but did not
understand it. In the present edition it is fully set forth after due consideration.)
Unknown until now, he has held hidden from us the true facts of the fabulous
period among the nations, and much more so those of the obscure period which
all had despaired of knowing, and consequently the first true origins of the
things of the historic period. These are the three periods of the world which
Marcus Terentius Varro, the most learned writer on Roman antiquities, re-
corded for us in his great work entitled [Antiquitates] rerum divinarum et
humanarum, which has been lost.
7 Moreover, it may here be pointed out that in the present work, with a
new critical art that has hitherto been lacking, entering on the research of the
truth concerning the authors of these same [gentile] nations (among which
6 THE NEW SCIENCE
more than a thousand years had to pass in order to bring forth the writers with
whom criticism has hitherto been concerned), philosophy undertakes to ex-
amine philology (that is, the doctrine of everything that depends on the human
will; for example, all histories of the languages, customs and deeds of peoples
in war and peace), of which, because of the deplorable obscurity of causes and
almost infinite variety of effects, philosophy has had almost a horror of treat-
ing; and reduces it to the form of a science by discovering in it the design of an
ideal eternal history traversed in time by the histories of all nations; so that, on
account of this its second principal aspect, our Science may be considered a
philosophy of authority. For by virtue of new principles of mythology herein
disclosed as consequences of the new principles of poetry found herein, it is
shown that the fables were true and trustworthy histories of the customs of
the most ancient peoples of Greece. In the first place, the fables of the gods were
stories of the times in which men of the crudest gentile humanity thought that
all things necessary or useful to the human race were deities. The authors of this
poetry were the first peoples, whom we find to have been all theological poets,
who without doubt, as we are told, founded the gentile nations with fables of
the gods. And here, by the principles of this new critical art, we consider at what
determinate times and on what particular occasions of human necessity or
utility felt by the first men of the gentile world, they, with frightful religions
which they themselves feigned and believed in, imagined first such and such
gods and then such and such others. The natural theogony or generation of the
gods, formed naturally in the minds of these first men, may give us a rational
chronology of the poetic history of the gods. [In the second place,] the heroic
fables were true stories of the heroes and their heroic customs, which are found
to have flourished in the barbarous period of all nations; so that the two poems
of Homer are found to be two great treasure houses of discoveries of the natural
law of nations among the still barbarous Greeks. In the present work this
period of barbarism is determined to have lasted among the Greeks until the
time of Herodotus, called the father of Greek history, whose books are for the
most part full of fables and whose style retains very much of the Homeric. This
is a characteristic retained by all the historians who came after him, as they
used a phraseology half way between the poetic and the vulgar. But Thucyd-
ides, the first scrupulous and serious historian of Greece, at the beginning of
his account, declares that down to his father's time (and thus to that of Herod-
otus, who was an old man when Thucydides was a child) the Greeks were
quite ignorant of their own antiquities, to say nothing of those of other peoples
(which, apart from the Roman, have all come down to us through the Greeks).
These antiquities are the deep shadows which the picture shows in the back-
ground, against which there stand forth, in the light of the ray of divine provi-
dence reflected by metaphysic upon Homer, all the hieroglyphs which represent
the principles, known until now only by the effects, of this world of nations.
8 Among these [hieroglyphs] the most prominent is an altar, because
IDEA OF THE WORK 7
among all peoples the civil world began with religion, as we have briefly noted
a while back and as we shall shortly observe more fully.
9 Upon the altar, at the left, the first object we see is a lituus, the staff
with which the augurs took auguries and observed the auspices. This signifies
divination, from which, among the gentiles, the first divine things took their
origin. The Hebrews thought God to be an infinite Mind beholding all times in
one point of eternity, whence God, either Himself or through the angels that
are minds or through the prophets to whose minds God spoke, gave notice of
what was in store for His people. The gentiles fancied bodies to be gods, that
by sensible signs they might give notice of what was in store for the peoples.
On account of the attribute of His providence, as true among the Hebrews as
it was imagined among the gentiles, all humankind gave to the nature of God
the name "divinity" by one common idea, which the Latins expressed in
divinari, "to foretell the future"; but with the aforesaid fundamental difference
from which derive all the other essential differences shown by our Science be-
tween the natural law of the Hebrews and the natural law of nations. The
Roman jurisconsults defined the latter as having been ordained by divine provi-
dence along with human customs themselves. Thus the aforesaid lituus repre-
sents also the beginning of gentile universal history, which is shown by physical
and philological evidence to have begun with the universal flood. After an inter-
val of two centuries (as fabulous history relates), Heaven reigned on earth and
bestowed many and great blessings on mankind, and, by uniformity of ideas
among orientals, Egyptians, Greeks, Latins and other gentile nations, there
arose equally the religions of as many Joves. For at the end of this period of
time after the flood, heaven must have thundered and lightened, and from the
thunder and lightning of its Jove each nation began to take auspices. This
multiplicity of Joves, which led the Egyptians to call their Jove Ammon the
oldest of them all, has hitherto been a marvel to the philologians. The same two-
fold evidence proves the religion of the Hebrews more ancient than those by
which the nations were founded, and hence the truth of the Christian religion.
10 On the altar near the lituus may be seen the water and fire, the former
contained in a jar. For with a view to divination sacrifices arose among the
gentiles from that common custom of theirs which the Latins called procurare
auspicia, i.e. to sacrifice in order to understand the auguries well so that the
divine warnings or commands of Jove might be properly carried out. These are
the divine things among the gentiles, from which came later all their human
things.
11 The first of these [human things] was marriage, symbolized by the
torch lit from the fire on the altar and leaning against the jar. For marriage, as
all statesmen agree, is the seed-plot of the family, as the family is the seed-plot
of the common weal th.To denote this, the torch, although it i r the hieroglyph of
a human thing, is placed on the altar along with the water and the fire, which
are hieroglyphs of divine ceremonies; just as the ancient Romans celebrated
8 THE NEW SCIENCE
nuptials aqua et igni, because it was understood that by divine counsel these
two common things (and, before fire even, perennial water as a thing more
necessary to life) had led men to live in society.
12 The second of human things is burial. (Indeed humanhas in Latin
comes first and properly from humando, "burying.") This institution is sym-
bolized by a cinerary urn, placed to one side within the forest, indicating that
burial goes pack to a time when men ate fruit in summer and acorns in winter.
The urn is inscribed D. A/., which means "to the good souls of the dead." This
motto represents the common consent of all mankind in the opinion later proved
true by Plato, that human souls do not die with their bodies but that they are
immortal.
13 The urn indicates also the origin among the gentiles of the division
of the fields, to which is to be traced the distinction of cities and peoples and
finally of nations. For it will be found that the races, first of Ham, then of
Japheth and finally of Shem, without the religion of their father Noah, which
they had repudiated (and which alone, in what was then the state of nature,
could have held them by marriages in a society of families), were lost from one
another by roving wild in the great forest of the earth, pursuing shy and in-
docile women, and fleeing from the wild animals with which the great ancient
forest must have abounded. They were scattered further in search of pasture
and water, and as the result of it all were reduced, at the end of a long period,
to the condition of beasts. Then, on certain occasions ordained by divine provi-
dence (occasions which our Science studies and discovers), shaken and aroused
by a terrible fear, each of the particular Uranus and Jove he had feigned and
believed in, some of them finally left off wandering and went into hiding in
definite places. There, settled with particular women, through fear of the ap-
prehended divinity, in religious and chaste carnal unions they solemnized mar-
riages under cover and begat acknowledged children and so founded families.
By long residence and burial of their dead they came to found and divide the
first dominions of the earth, whose lords were called giants, a Greek word mean-
ing "children of the earth," i.e. descendants of those who have been buried.
Hence they considered themselves noble, justly ascribing their nobility in that
first state of human things to their having been humanly engendered in the
fear of the divinity. From this manner of human engendering and not from
anything else, what is called human generation took its name. The houses which
had branched out into several families thus formed were called the first nations
[gentes] because of such generation. As the subject matter of the natural law of
nations begins at so early a time, so in this work the doctrine begins there too.
This is a third principal aspect under which our Science should be viewed. Now
there are both physical and moral reasons, apart from the authority of history,
to show that the giants must have been of disproportionate strength and stature.
Since these reasons did not obtain in the case of believers in the true God, creator
of the world and of Adam the prince of all humankind, the Hebrews from the
IDEA OF THE WORK 9
very beginning of the world were of proper stature. So, after the first principle
of divine providence and the second of solemn matrimony, the universal belief
in the immortality of the soul, which had its beginnings in the institution of
burial, is the third of the three principles on which this Science bases its discus-
sions of the origins of all the innumerable various and diverse things of which
it treats.
14 From the forests where the urn is placed a plough stands forth,
signifying that the fathers of the first peoples were the first strong men of
history. Hence the founders of the first gentile nations above mentioned were
the Herculeses (of whom Varro counted a good forty and the Egyptians claimed
theirs to be the most ancient), for these Herculeses subdued the first lands of
the world and brought them under cultivation. Thus the first fathers of the
gentile nations who were [i] just in virtue of the supposed piety of observing
the auspices which they believed divine commands of Jove (from whose Latin
name lous came the old word ious for "law," later contracted to ius; so that
justice among all peoples is naturally taught along with piety); [2] prudent
in sacrificing to obtain or clearly to understand the auspices, and thus to take
good counsel of what, by the commands of Jove, they should undertake in life;
and [3] temperate in the institution of matrimony were also, as is here in-
dicated, [4] strong men. Hence new principles are given to moral philosophy, in
order that the esoteric wisdom of the philosophers may conspire with the vulgar
wisdom of lawmakers. By these principles all the virtues have their roots in
piety and religion, by which alone the virtues are made effective in action, and
by reason of which men propose to themselves as good whatever God wills. New
principles are given also to economic doctrine, by which sons, so long as they
are in the power of their fathers, must be considered to be in the family state, and
consequently are in no other way to be formed and confirmed in all their
studies than in piety and religion. Since they are not yet capable of under-
standing commonwealth and laws, they are to reverence and fear their fathers
as living images of God, so as to be naturally disposed to follow the religion of
their fathers and to defend their fatherland, which preserves their families for
them, and so to obey the laws ordained for the preservation of their religion
and fatherland. (For divine providence ordained human things with this eternal
counsel: that families should first be founded by means of religions, and that
upon the families commonwealths should then arise by means of laws.)
15 The plough rests its handle against the altar with a certain majesty,
to give us to understand that ploughed lands were the first altars of the gentiles,
and to denote also the natural superiority which the heroes believed they had
over their socii. (The latter, as we shall see shortly, are symbolized by the rudder
which is seen bowing near the base of the altar.) On this superiority of nature,
it will be shown, the heroes grounded the law, the science and hence the ad-
ministration of divine things (i.e. the auspices), which were in their keeping.
16 The plough shows only the point of the share and hides the mold-
I0 THE NEW SCIENCE
board. Before the use of iron was known, the share had to be made of a curved
piece of very hard wood, capable of breaking and turning the earth. The Latins
called the moldboard urbs, whence the ancient urbum, "curved." The moldboard
is hidden to signify that the first cities, which were all founded on cultivated
fields, arose as a result of families being for a long time quite withdrawn and hid-
den among the sacred terrors of the religious forests. These [cultivated fields] are
found among all the ancient gentile nations and, by an idea common to all,
were called by the Latin peoples luci, meaning "burnt lands within the en-
closure of the woods." The woods themselves were condemned by Moses to
be burned wherever the people of God extended their conquests. This was by
counsel of divine providence to the end that those who had already reached
the stage of humanity should not again become confounded with the wanderers
who still nefariously held property and women in common.
17 There may be seen at the left side of the altar a rudder, symbolizing
the origin of the migration of peoples by means of navigation. And by its seem-
ing to bow at the foot of the altar, it symbolizes the ancestors of those who
later were the authors of these migrations. These [ancestors] were at first im-
pious men, who recognized no divinity; they were nefarious, since relations
among them were not distinguished by marriages, and sons often lay with
mothers and fathers with daughters; and finally, because like wild beasts they
had no mind for society in the midst of this infamous communism of possessions,
they were all alone and hence weak and finally miserable and unhappy, be-
cause lacking all the goods which are necessary for preservation and security
of life. Fleeing the several ills they suffered in the dissensions which this savage
communism [of possessions] produced, and seeking escape and safety, they be-
took themselves to the cultivated lands of the pious, chaste, strong and even
powerful, that is, of those who were already united in family society. From these
lands, it will be found, cities were called arae, "altars," throughout the ancient
world of the gentiles. For they must have been the first altars of the gentile na-
tions, and the first fire lighted on them was that which served to clear the
forests of trees and bring them under cultivation, and the first water was that
of the perennial springs, which were necessary in order that those destined to
found humanity should no longer wander in bestial vagrancy in search of water,
but settle for a long time in one place and give up vagabondage. And since
these altars were evidently the first asylums of the world (which Livy defines
generally as vetus urbcs condentium consilium, "an old counsel of founders
of cities," as we are told that within the asylum opened in the grove Romulus
founded Rome), hence the first cities were almost all called altars. To this
minor discovery let us add a major one: that among the Greeks (from whom,
as was said above, we have learned all that we know of gentile antiquity) the
first Thrace or Scythia (i.e. the first North), the first Asia and the first India (i.e.
the first East), the first Mauretania or Libya (i.e. the first South) and the first
Europe or first Hesperia (i.e. the first West), and along with all these the first
IDEA OF THE WORK n
Ocean, were born within Greece itself; and then the Greeks, going abroad in
the world, extended these names by analogy to its four parts and to the ocean
that surrounds it. These discoveries, we assert, give new principles to geography,
which, like the new principles already promised for chronology, are necessary
if we are to read the ideal eternal history above mentioned. For chronology
and geography are the two eyes of history.
1 8 To these altars then, the impious-nomadic-weak, fleeing for their lives
from the stronger, came seeking refuge, and the pious-strong killed the violent
among them and took the weak under their protection. Since the latter brought
with them nothing but their lives, they were accepted as famuli and given the
means of sustaining life. The family took its name principally from these
famuli, whose status roughly approximated that of the slaves who came later
with the taking of prisoners in war. Hence like several branches from one trunk
spring the origins (i) of the asylums, as we have seen; (2) of families, from
which cities later arose, as we shall explain below; (3) of the founding of cities,
that men might live secure from the unjust and the violent; (4) of jurisdictions
to be exercised within prescribed territories; (5) of the extension of empires,
which comes by the practice of justice, strength and magnanimity, which are
the most luminous virtues of princes and states; (6) of family coats-of-arms,
whose first fields-of-arms are found to have stood for the first seed-fields; (7) of
fame, from which the famuli derived their name, and of glory, which is eternally
inherent in serving the human race; (8) of true nobility, which arises naturally
from the practice of the moral virtues; (9) of true heroism, which is to put
down the proud and give aid to those in danger (in which heroism the Roman
people surpassed all other peoples of the earth and so became master of the
world); and lastly, (10) of war and peace, the former taking its start in the
world from self-defense, in which the true virtue of strength consists. In all these
origins one can trace the eternal plan of commonwealths, on which states,
though acquired by violence and fraud, must take their stand in order to sur-
vive, as on the other hand those acquired by way of these virtuous origins
afterwards fall to ruin through fraud and violence. This plan of commonwealths
is founded on the two eternal principles of this world of nations, namely the
mind and the body of the men who compose it. For men consist of these two
parts, one of which is noble and should therefore command, and the other of
which is base and should serve. But because of the corruption of human nature,
the generic character of men cannot without the help of philosophy (which can
aid but few) bring it about that every individual's mind should command and
not serve his body. Therefore divine providence ordained human things with
this eternal order: that, in commonwealths, those who use their minds should
command and those who use their bodies should obey.
19 The rudder bows at the foot of the altar because th.se famuli, as men
without gods, had no share in divine things and consequently no community
even of human things with the nobles. Above all, they lacked the right to cele-
12 THE NEW SCIENCE
bratc solemn nuptials, which the Latins called connubium. The most solemn
part of the ceremony was the taking of the auspices, by reason of which the
nobles thought themselves to be of divine origin and held the famuli to be of
bestial origin, as generated by nefarious couplings. Bound up with this distinc-
tion of a nobler nature we find, equally among the Egyptians, Greeks and
Latins, a presumed natural heroism, as is more than sufficiently made plain to
us in ancient Roman history.
20 Finally the rudder is at some distance from the plough, which is in
front of the altar and displays to the rudder a hostile aspect, menacing it with
its point. For the famuli, having no share, as we have seen, in the ownership
of lands, which were all in the hands of the nobles, grew weary of being obliged
always to serve their lords. At last, after a long period, they laid claim to the
lands and rose in mutiny to enforce the claim, and revolted against the heroes in
agrarian contests which, we shall learn, were much more ancient than and very
different from those that we read of in later Roman history. Many leaders of
bands of famuli which had rebelled and been conquered by the heroes (as the
serfs of Egypt often were by their priests, according to the observation of Peter
van der Kuhn, D<? republica hebraeorum), in order to avoid oppression and to
find escape and safety along with the members of their factions, committed
themselves to the hazards of the sea and went in search of unoccupied lands
along the shores of the Mediterranean, toward the West where the coasts were
not then inhabited. This is the origin of the transmigration of peoples already
humanized by religion, starting from the East (Phoenicia above all) and from
Egypt, as happened later, for the same reasons, in the case of the Greeks. In
such wise not inundations of peoples, which cannot take place by sea; nor the
jealous desire of keeping remote acquisitions by means of recognized colonies,
since we do not read of any empire of the East or of Egypt or Greece being ex-
tended into the West; nor reasons of trade, for the western coasts were not yet
inhabited; but rather heroic law made it necessary for such bands of men in
these nations to abandon their own lands, a thing which naturally happens only
under some extreme necessity. By means of such colonies, which will accord-
ingly be called "heroic overseas colonies," the human race was spread abroad in
the rest of our world by sea, just as by means of the savage wanderings a long
time before it had been spread abroad by land.
21 Standing a little further out, in front of the plough, there is a tablet
inscribed with an ancient Latin alphabet (which, as Tacitus relates, was similar
to the ancient Greek) and, underneath, the latest alphabet that has come down
to us. This tablet symbolizes the origin of the languages and letters that are
called vulgar. These are found to have come into being a long time after the
founding of the nations, and letters much later than languages. To signify this,
the tablet rests on a fragment of a column of the Corinthian order, which
came quite late among the architectural orders.
22 The tablet lies near the plough and far from the rudder, to signify the
IDEA OF THE WORK I3
origin of native languages, which were first formed each in its own land, where
the founders of the nations, scattered and dispersed through the great forest
of the earth as we have said above, finally came together by chance and ceased
their bestial wandering. With these native languages the Eastern or Egyptian
or Greek tongues long afterwards mingled, on the occasion of the above-
mentioned transmigration of peoples to the shores of the Mediterranean and
the Ocean. Here we get new principles of etymology, abundantly illustrated
throughout this work, by which the origins of native words may be distinguished
from those that are unquestionably of foreign origin. The important difference
is that native etymologies are histories of things signified by the words in the
natural order of ideas. First the woods, then cultivated fields and huts, next
little houses and villages, thence cities, finally academies and philosophers: this
is the order of all progress from the first origins. Foreign etymologies, on the
other hand, are mere stories of words taken by one language from another.
23 The tablet shows only the first letters of the alphabets and lies facing
the statue of Homer. For the letters, as Greek tradition tells us of Greek letters,
were not all invented at one time; at least they cannot all have been invented
by Homer's time, for we know that he left none of his poems in writing. But
of the origin of native languages more particular information will be given
further on.
24 Lastly, in the plane most illuminated of all, because the hieroglyphs
there displayed represent the most familiar human things, the ingenious artist
exhibits in capricious arrangement the Roman fasces, a sword and a purse lean-
ing against the fasces, a balance and the caduceus of Mercury.
25 The first of these symbols is the fasces because the first civil empires
arose on the union of the paternal powers of the fathers. Among the gentiles
these fathers were sages in auspicial divinity, priests who sacrificed to take the
auspices or make sure of their meaning, and certainly monarchs who com-
manded what they believed to be the will of the gods as shown in the auspices,
and consequently were subject to no one but God. So the fasces are a bundle of
litui or rods of divination, which we find to be the first scepters of the world.
These fathers, in the agrarian disturbances we have mentioned above, in order
to resist the bands of famuli aroused against them, were naturally led to unite
and enclose themselves in the first orders of reigning senates (or senates made
up of so many kings of families) under certain heads-of -orders. These are
found to have been the first kings of the heroic cities. Ancient history tells us,
though too obscurely, that in the first world of the peoples kings were created
by nature; our studies discover the manner. Now these reigning senates, to con-
tent the revolting bands of famuli and reduce them to obedience, granted them
an agrarian law, which is found to have been the first civil law born in the
world; and naturally the first plebs of the cities were composed of these famuli t
subdued by this law. What the nobles granted the plebeians was natural domain
of the fields, civil domain remaining with the nobles, who were the only citizens
I 4 THE NEW SCIENCE
of the heroic cities. Thence arose the eminent domain of the orders which were
the first civil or sovereign powers of the peoples. All three kinds of domain were
formed and distinguished one from another at the birth of the commonwealths,
which among all the nations, by one idea variously expressed, are found to have
been called "Herculean commonwealths" or commonwealths of Curetes, armed
men in public assembly. This clears up the origins of the famous ius Quiritium,
which the interpreters of Roman law have thought to be peculiar to the citizens
of Rome, as in later times it was; but in the ancient Roman times it was evi-
dently a natural law of all the heroic peoples. And thence, as various streams
from a common source, numerous origins spring forth, (i) The origin of cities,
which arose from the families not of sons only but of famuli also. Thus they
will be seen to be founded by nature on two communities, one of the nobles,
to command, the other of the plebs, to obey. Of these two parts is composed the
entire polity or law of civil governments. For it is shown that the first cities, of
this or indeed any other kind, could not arise from families of sons only. (2) The
origins of public empires, which were born from the union of private father-
sovereign empires in the family state. (3) The origins of war and peace, whereby
all commonwealths were brought into being by force of arms and then com-
posed by laws. From the nature of these [two] human things derives their
eternal property: that wars are waged so that peoples may live secure
in peace. (4) The origin of fiefs, for by one sort of rustic fiefs the plebeians
became subject to the nobles, and by another sort of noble or military
fiefs the nobles, who were sovereign in their own families, became subject
to the greater sovereignty of their heroic orders. We find that the kingdoms
of barbarian times have always had a feudal basis. This sheds light on the history
of the modern kingdoms of Europe, which arose in those latest barbarian times
that are more obscure to us than the first barbarian times of which Varro wrote.
For these first fields were given by the nobles to the plebs under burden of a
payment [variously] called tithe of Hercules (among the Greeks) or census
(which we find to be what Servius Tullius ordained for the Romans) or tribute.
The plebs were further obliged to serve the nobles in war at their own expense,
as is plain to be seen in ancient Roman history. Here appears (5) the origin of
the census which remained the basis of the popular commonwealths. Of all
our researches into things Roman, the most difficult has been that of tracing the
process by which this [popular census] developed from that of Servius Tullius,
which will be found to have been the basis of the ancient aristocratic common-
wealths. The relation between the two has made everyone fall into the error of
assuming that Servius Tullius ordered the census as a basis for popular liberty.
26 From the same beginning come also: (6) The origin of commerce,
which, in the form we have indicated, began in real estate with the beginnings
of the cities themselves. The term "commerce" is derived from that first merces
or payment in the world, the fields which the heroes gave the famuli under the
IDEA OF THE WORK 15
aforesaid law obliging the latter to serve them. (7) The origin of public treas-
uries, the rudiments of which were there from the birth of the commonwealths
but which assumed the recognizable form properly called aeraria (from aes
aeris in the sense of "money") when the public had to supply money to the
plebs in war time. (8) The origin of colonies, which are found to have been
bands first of peasants who served the heroes for the sustenance of their lives,
then of vassals who cultivated the fields for themselves under the aforesaid real
and personal obligations. These we shall call heroic inland colonies to differ-
entiate them from the overseas colonies mentioned above. And finally (9) the
origins of the commonwealths, which had at their birth a most severe aristocratic
form, in which the plebeians had no share in the civil law. In this connection
the Roman commonwealth is found to have been an aristocratic kingdom which
fell under the tyranny of Tarquinius Superbus, who sadly misgoverned the
nobles and almost destroyed the senate. When Lucretia stabbed herself, Junius
Brutus seized the occasion to arouse the plebs against the Tarquins, and, having
freed Rome from their tyranny, reestablished the senate and reorganized the
commonwealth on its first principles. For by substituting two annual consuls
for one king for life, he did not introduce popular liberty but rather reaffirmed
the liberty of the nobles. This is found to have lasted till the Publilian Law,
which won for the dictator Publilius Philo the epithet "popular" by declaring
that the Roman commonwealth had become popular in its form of government.
Indeed it expired only with the Petelian Law, which completely freed the peo-
ple from the feudal rustic right of private imprisonment which the nobles had
over their plebeian debtors. These two laws, which contain the two major points
in Roman history, have been pondered neither by statesmen nor by jurists nor
by the learned interpreters of Roman law. For they have been misled by the
fable that the Law of the Twelve Tables came from free Athens to set up popu-
lar liberty in Rome, whereas these two laws declare it to have been set up at home
by the natural customs of the Romans themselves. (This fable was exposed in
the Principles of Universal Law, printed many years ago.) Therefore, since
the laws of a commonwealth must be interpreted according to its form of gov-
ernment, these principles of Roman government involve new principles for
Roman jurisprudence.
27 The sword leaning on the fasces indicates that heroic law was a law
of force but subject to religion, which alone can keep force and arms in their
place where judiciary laws do not yet exist or are no longer recognized. This
law is precisely that of Achilles, the hero sung by Homer to the Greeks as an
example of heroic virtue, who made arms the arbiter of right. Here is revealed
the origin of duels; which, as they were certainly celebrated in the last barbarian
times, so they are found to have been practiced in the first barbarian times when
the mighty were not yet so tamed as to avenge offenses and injuries by appeal to
judiciary laws. The duels they practiced were appeals to certain divine judg-
ments. They called on God as witness and made God judge of the offense, and
1 6 THE NEW SCIENCE
accepted with such reverence the decision that was given by the fortune of
the combat that even if the outraged party fell vanquished he was considered
guilty. This was a lofty counsel of divine providence, to the end that, in fierce
and barbarous times in which law was not understood, it might be measured
by God's favor or disfavor, so that such private wars might not sow the seeds
of [greater] wars which would have ended in the extinction of the human
race. This natural barbarian sense can only be grounded in the innate concept
which men have of that divine providence in which they must acquiesce when
they see the good oppressed and the wicked prospering. For all these reasons
the duel was thought to be a kind of divine purgation, and in barbarian times
the belief in its necessity was quite as firm as the prohibition of it in the humanity
of our day with its civil and criminal courts. In such duels or private wars is
found the origin of public wars which are waged by civil powers subject to no
one but God, in order that God may settle them by the fortune of victory; so
that the human race may rest on the certainty of civil states. This is the prin-
ciple of the external justice, as it is called, of wars.
28 The purse resting against the fasces shows that commerce carried
on by means of money began late, after the civil empires were founded, so
that we read of no coined money in either of the two poems of Homer. This
same hieroglyph indicates the origin of such coined money, which is found
to have been the same as that of family coats-of-arms. The latter (as we have
intimated above in connection with the first fields-of-arms) are discovered to
have signified rights and titles of nobility belonging to one family rather than
to another. Thence came the origin of public emblems, or ensigns of the people,
which were then raised as military ensigns used as a mute language by military
discipline; and finally among all peoples they gave their imprint to coins. Here
are given new principles to numismatics, and thereby also to the science of
blazonry as it is called; which is one of the three topics on which we find our-
selves satisfied with the first edition of the New Science.
29 The balance next to the purse is meant to indicate that, after the
aristocratic governments, which were heroic governments, there came human
governments, at first popular in character. The people had finally come to
understand that the rational nature (which is the true human nature) is equal
in all men. From this natural equality (by occasions conceived in the ideal
eternal history and encountered exactly in Roman history) they gradually
brought the heroes to civil equality in popular commonwealths. This civil
equality is symbolized by the balance, because, as the Greeks said, in the popular
commonwealths everything goes by lot or by balance. But finally, as the free
peoples could not by means of laws maintain themselves in civil equality be-
cause of the factions of the powerful, but were being driven to ruin by civil
wars, it came about naturally that, obeying a natural royal law or rather natural
custom of human peoples, they sought protection under monarchies, which con-
stitute the other type of human government. (This natural royal law is com-
IDEA OF THE WORK 17
mon to all peoples in all times in popular states which have grown corrupt, but
the civil royal law, which is said to have been commanded by the Roman peo-
ple to legitimize the Roman monarchy in the person of Augustus, is shown in
our Principles of Universal Law to have been a fable. Our demonstration of
this, and of the legendary nature of the story that the Law of the Twelve Tables
came from Athens, are two passages which permit us to believe that we did not
write that work in vain.) In the humanity of our day, there are alternations of
these last two forms of government, both human, but neither of the two passes
by nature into an aristocratic state where only the nobles command and all
the others obey. Hence the commonwealths of nobles now left in the world
are few and far between: Nuremberg in Germany; Ragusa in Dalmatia; Venice,
Genoa and Lucca in Italy. These, then, are the three types of states that divine
providence, through the natural customs of the nations, has caused to come
into the world, and they succeed one another in this natural order. Since other
types, arising by human providence as mixtures of these three, are not sup-
ported by the nature of nations, they were characterized by Tacitus (who saw
only the effects of the causes we here point out and later treat more fully) as
"more laudable than susceptible of attainment, and if by chance any do occur
they are not at all lasting." By this discovery new principles are given to polit-
ical theory, not merely different from but contrary to those which have been
imagined hitherto.
30 The caduceus is the last of the hieroglyphs, to tell us that the first
peoples, in their heroic times when the natural law of force reigned supreme,
looked upon each other as perpetual enemies, and pillage and piracy were con-
tinual because, as war was eternal between them, there was no need of declara-
tions. (Indeed, as in the first barbarian times the heroes considered it a title of
honor to be called thieves, so in the returned barbarian times the powerful re-
joiced to be called pirates.) But when human governments had been estab-
lished, whether popular or monarchical, by the law of human peoples heralds
were introduced to give warning of wars, and periods of hostility began to be
terminated by treaties of peace. And this by a high counsel of divine providence,
to the end that nations in their period of barbarism, when they were new in
the world and needed to take root, should remain circumscribed within their
boundaries and not, fierce and untamed as they were, cross them to exterminate
each other in wars; but after they had grown up and at the same time become
familiar with each other and hence tolerant of each other's customs, it should
hen be easy for conquering peoples to spare the lives of the conquered by the
just laws of victory.
31 So this New Science or metaphysic, pondering the common nature
of nations in the light of divine providence, having discovered such origins of
divine and human things among the gentile nations, establishes thence a system
of the natural law of nations, which proceeds with the greatest equality and
constancy through the three ages which the Egyptians handed down to us as
1 8 THE NEW SCIENCE
the three periods through which the world had passed up to their time. These
are: (i.) The age of the gods, in which the gentiles believed they lived under
divine governments, and everything was commanded them by auspices and
oracles, which are the oldest things in profane history. (2) The age of the
heroes, in which they reigned everywhere in aristocratic commonwealths, on ac-
count of a certain superiority of nature which they held themselves to have over
the plebs. (3) The age of men, in which all men recognized themselves as equal
in human nature, and therefore there were established first the popular common-
wealths and then the monarchies, both of which are forms of human govern-
ment, as we observed a short while ago [29].
32 In harmony with these three kinds of nature and government, three
kinds of language were spoken which compose the vocabulary of this Science:
( i ) That of the time of the families when gentile men were newly received into
humanity. This, we shall find, was a mute language of signs and physical objects
having natural relations to the ideas they wished to express. (2) That spoken by
means of heroic emblems, or similitudes, comparisons, images, metaphors, and
natural descriptions, which make up the great body of the heroic language
which was spoken at the time the heroes reigned. (3) Human language using
words agreed upon by the people, a language of which they are absolute lords,
and which is proper to the popular commonwealths and monarchical states;
a language whereby the people may fix the meaning of the laws by which the
nobles as well as the plebs are bound. Hence, among all nations, once the laws
had been put into the vulgar tongue, the science of laws passed from the control
of the nobles. Hitherto, among all nations, the nobles had kept the laws in a
secret language as a sacred thing, for it will be found that everywhere the nobles
were also priests. That is the natural reason for the secrecy of the laws among
the Roman patricians until popular liberty arose. Now these are the same three
languages that the Egyptians claimed had been spoken before in their world,
corresponding exactly both in number and in sequence to the three ages that had
run their course before them, (i) The hieroglyphic or sacred or secret lan-
guage, by means of mute acts. This is suited to the uses of religion, which it
is more important to attend to than to talk about. (2) The symbolic, by means
of similitudes, such as we have just seen the heroic language to have been. (3)
The epistolary or vulgar, which served the common uses of life. These three
types of language are found among the Chaldeans, Scythians, Egyptians, Ger-
mans, and all the other ancient gentile nations; although hieroglyphic writing
was best preserved among the Egyptians, because for a longer time than the
other peoples they were closed to all foreign nations (it is for the same reason
that it has been found to exist still among the Chinese), and hence we have
a proof of the vanity of their imagined remote antiquity.
33 We here bring to light the beginnings not only of languages but also
of letters, which philology has hitherto despaired of finding. We shall give a
specimen [430] of the extravagant and monstrous opinions that have been held
IDEA OF THE WORK 19
up to now. We shall observe that the unhappy cause of this effect is that philol-
ogists have believed that among the nations languages first came into being
and then letters; whereas (to give here a brief indication of what will be fully
proved in this volume) letters and languages were born twins and proceeded
apace through all their three stages. These beginnings are precisely exhibited
in the causes of the Latin language, as set forth in the first edition of the New
Science (which is the second of the three passages on whose account we do not
regret that book). By the reasoning out of these causes many discoveries have
been made in ancient Roman history, government and law, as you will observe
a thousand times, O reader, in this volume. From this example, scholars of
oriental languages, of Greek, and, among the modern languages, particularly
of German, which is a mother language, will be enabled to make discoveries of
antiquities far beyond their expectations and ours.
34 We find that the principle of these origins both of languages and of
letters lies in the fact that the early gentile peoples, by a demonstrated neces-
sity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters. This discovery, which
is the master key of this Science, has cost us the persistent research of almost
all our literary life, because with our civilized natures we cannot at all imagine
and can only understand by great toil the poetic nature of these first men. The
[poetic] characters of which we speak are found to have been certain imagina-
tive genera (images for the most part of animate beings, of gods or heroes,
formed by their imagination) to which they reduced all the species or all the
particulars appertaining to each genus; exactly as the fables of human times,
such as those of late comedy, are intelligible genera reasoned out by moral
philosophy, from which the comic poets form imaginative genera (for the
perfected ideas of the various human types are nothing but that) which are the
persons of the comedies. Hence such divine or heroic characters are found to
have been true fables or stories, and their allegories are discovered to contain
meanings not analogical but univocal, not philosophical but historical, of the
peoples of Greece of those times. Furthermore, since these genera (for that is
what the fables in essence are) were formed by most vigorous imaginations,
as in men of the feeblest reasoning powers, we discover in them true poetic
sentences, which must be sentiments clothed in the greatest passions and there-
fore full of sublimity and arousing wonder. Furthermore the sources of all
poetic locution are found to be two: poverty of language and necessity to explain
and make oneself understood. Hence it is evident that heroic speech followed
immediately on the mute language of acts and objects that had natural rela-
tions to the ideas they were meant to signify, which was used in the divine
times. And finally, through the necessary natural course of human things, lan-
guage among the Assyrians, Syrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks and
Latins will be found to have begun with heroic verses, thence to have passed to
iambics and finally to have settled into prose. This gives certainty to the his-
tory of the ancient poets and explains why in the German language, par-
ao THE NEW SCIENCE
ticularly in Silesia, a province of peasants, there are many natural versifiers, and
in the Spanish, French and Italian languages the first authors wrote in verse.
35 From these three languages is formed the mental dictionary by which
to interpret properly all the various articulated languages, and we make use of
it here wherever it is needed. In the first edition of the New Science we gave a
full particular example of it, in which this idea was presented: that from the
eternal properties of the fathers, which we in virtue of this Science considered
them to have had in the state of the families and of the first heroic cities in
the time when the languages were formed, we find proper meanings [of terms]
in fifteen different languages, both dead and living, by which they were di-
versely called, sometimes from one property and sometimes from another. (This
is the third passage in which we take satisfaction in that edition of our book.)
Such a lexicon is necessary for learning the language spoken by the ideal eternal
history traversed in time by the histories of all nations, and for scientifically ad-
ducing authorities to confirm what is discussed in the natural law of nations
and hence in every particular jurisprudence.
36 Along with these three languages proper to the three ages in which
three forms of government prevailed, conforming to three types of civil natures,
which succeed one another as the nations run their course we find there went
also in the same order a jurisprudence suited to each in its time.
37 Of these [three types of jurisprudence] the first was a mystic the-
ology, which prevailed in the period when the gentiles were commanded by the
gods. Its wise men were the theological poets (who are said to have founded
gentile humanity) who interpreted the mysteries of the oracles, which among
all nations gave their responses in verse. Thus we find that the mysteries of
this vulgar wisdom were hidden in the fables. In this connection we inquire into
the reasons why the philosophers later had such a desire to recover the wisdom of
the ancients, as well as into the occasions the fables provided them for be-
stirring themselves to meditate lofty things in philosophy, and into the oppor-
tunities they had for reading their own hidden wisdom into the fables.
38 The second was the heroic jurisprudence, all verbal scrupulosity (in
which Ulysses was manifestly expert). This jurisprudence looked to what the
Roman jurisconsults called civil equity and we call reason of state. With their
limited ideas, the heroes thought they had a natural right to precisely what, how
much and of what sort had been set forth in words; as even now we may ob-
serve in peasants and other crude men, who in conflicts between words and
meanings obstinately say that their right stands for them in the words. And
this by counsel of divine providence to the end that the gentiles, not yet being
capable of universals, which good laws must be, might be led by this very par-
ticularity of their words to observe the laws universally. And if, as a conse-
quence of this [civil] equity, the laws turned out in a given case to be not only
harsh but actually cruel, they naturally bore it because they thought their law
was naturally such. Furthermore they were led to observe their laws by their
IDEA OF THE WORK 21
own highest interest, with which, we find, the heroes identified that of their
fatherlands, of which they were the only citizens. Hence they did not hesitate,
for the safety of their various fatherlands, to consecrate themselves and their
families to the will of the laws, which by maintaining the common security
of the fatherland kept secure for each of them a certain private monarchical
reign over his family. Moreover it was this great private interest, in conjunc-
tion with the supreme arrogance characteristic of barbarous times, which formed
their heroic nature, whence came so many heroic actions in defense of their
fatherlands. To these heroic deeds we must add intolerable pride, profound ava-
rice and the pitiless cruelty with which the ancient Roman patricians treated
the unhappy plebeians, as is clearly seen in Roman history precisely during
that period which Livy himself describes as having been the age of Roman
virtue and of the most flourishing popular liberty yet dreamed of in Rome. It
will be found that such public virtue was nothing but a good use which provi-
dence made of such grievous, ugly and cruel private vices, in order that the
cities might be preserved during a period when the minds of men, intent on
particulars, could not naturally understand a common good. Thence are de-
rived new principles by which to demonstrate the argument of St. Augustine's
discussion of the virtue of the Romans [City of God, V, 12]; and the opinion
hitherto held by the learned concerning the heroism of primitive peoples is put
to rout. Civil equity of this sort we find naturally observed by the heroic na-
tions in peace as well as in war (shining examples are adduced from the history
of the first barbarian times as well as from that of the last); and it was prac-
ticed privately by the Romans as long as theirs was an aristocratic common-
wealth, that is to say down to the times of the Publilian and Petelian laws, until
which time everything was based on the Law of the Twelve Tables.
39 The last type of jurisprudence was that of natural equity, which
reigns naturally in the free commonwealths, where the peoples, each for its
particular good (without understanding that it is the same for all), are led to
command universal laws. They naturally desire these laws to bend benignly to
the least details of matters calling for equal utility. This is the aequum bonum,
subject of the latest Roman jurisprudence, which from the times of Cicero had
begun to be transformed by the edict of the Roman praetor. This type is also
and perhaps even more connatural with monarchies, in which the monarchs have
accustomed their subjects to attend to their own private interests, while they
themselves have taken charge of all public affairs, and desire all nations sub-
ject to them to be made equal by the laws, in order that all may be equally
interested in the state. Wherefore the emperor Hadrian reformed the entire
heroic natural law of Rome with the aid of the human natural law of the prov-
inces, and commanded that jurisprudence should be based on the Perpetual
Edict which Salvius Julianus composed almost entirely f:om the provincial
edicts.
40 We may now recapitulate all the prime elements of this world of na-
22 THE NEW SCIENCE
dons by reference to the hieroglyphs which stand for them. The lituus, water
and fire on the altar, the cinerary urn within the forest, the plough leaning
against the altar, and the rudder prostrate at the foot of the altar signify divina-
tion, sacrifices, the first families including sons only, the practice of burial, the
cultivation of the fields and their division, the asylums, the later families in-
cluding famuli, the first agrarian conflicts and hence the first heroic inland
colonies and, when these failed, the overseas colonies and with these the first
transmigrations of peoples. All these came within the Egyptian age of the
gods, which Varro through ignorance or negligence called "the obscure period,"
as we have seen above. The fasces signify the first heroic commonwealths, the
distinction of the three domains (natural, civil and eminent), the first civil em-
pires, the first unequal alliances accorded under the first agrarian law by which
these first cities were founded on rustic fiefs of the plebeians, which in turn
were subfiefs of the noble fiefs of the heroes, who, though themselves sover-
eigns, became subjects of the higher sovereignty of the reigning heroic orders.
The sword leaning on the fasces signifies the public wars that were waged by
these cities, beginning with raids and rapine. (Duels, or private wars, must have
started much earlier, as we shall show, within the state of the families.) The
purse signifies devices of nobility or family coats-of-arms carried over onto
medals, the first ensigns of the peoples, which later became military ensigns and
finally coins, which here stand for the extension of trade to movable goods by
means of money. (Trade in real estate, with natural prices in produce or work,
had begun before in divine times with the first agrarian law, on the basis of
which the commonwealths were born.) The balance signifies the laws of
equality, which are laws properly speaking. Finally the caduceus signifies
formally declared public wars, terminated by formal peace. All the hieroglyphs
of this second group are far from the altar because they all stand for civil things
of the times in which the false religions were slowly disappearing, beginning
with the heroic agrarian conflicts, which gave the name to the Egyptian age of
heroes, called by Varro the "fabulous period." The tablet with the alphabets is
put between the divine and human symbols because with letters, from which
philosophies had their beginning, the false religions began to disappear; in con-
trast with the true, which is our Christian religion, which indeed is humanly
confirmed to us by the most sublime philosophies, the Platonic and the Peri-
patetic (insofar as it conforms to the Platonic).
41 The whole idea of this work may be summed up as follows. The
darkness in the background of the picture is the material of this Science, un-
certain, unformed, obscure, which is set forth in the Chronological Table and
in the Notes upon it. The ray with which divine providence lights up the
breast of mctaphysic represents the Axioms, Definitions and Postulates that
this Science takes as Elements from which to deduce the Principles on which
it is based and the Method by which it proceeds. All these things are contained
in the first book. The ray that is reflected from the breast of metaphysic onto
IDEA OF THE WORK 23
the statue of Homer is the proper light which is given to poetic wisdom in the
second book, and by which the true Homer is elucidated in the third book. By
"The Discovery of the True Homer" everything that makes up this world of
nations is clarified, proceeding from their origins according to the order in
which the hieroglyphs come forth into the light of the true Homer. This is the
Course of Nations considered in the fourth book. And having arrived finally
at the foot of the statue of Homer, they begin a Recurrence in the same order.
Of this we treat in the fifth and last book.
42 Last of all, to state the idea of the book in the briefest summary, the
entire engraving represents the three worlds in the order in which the human
minds of the gentiles have been raised from earth to heaven. All the hieroglyphs
visible on the ground denote the world of nations to which men applied them-
selves before anything else. The globe in the middle represents the world of
nature which the physicists later observed. The hieroglyphs above signify the
world of minds and of God which the metaphysicians finally contemplated.
BOOK ONE
ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES
[SECTION I]
NOTES ON THE CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE,
IN WHICH THE MATERIALS ARE SET IN ORDER
[Chronological table, based on the three temporal epochs of the Egyptians, who said all the
world before them had passed through three ages: that of the gods, that of the heroes, and that
of men.]
43 This Chronological Table sets forth in outline the world of the an-
cient nations, starting from the universal flood and passing from the Hebrews
through the Chaldeans, Scythians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans
down to the Second Punic War. On it there appear men and deeds of the
greatest renown, assigned to certain times and places by the community of
scholars. These men and deeds either did not have their being at the times or
in the places to which they have been commonly assigned, or never existed at
all. On the other hand, from the long dark shadows where they have lain buried,
notable men and most pertinent facts emerge, through whom and by which
the decisive changes in human affairs have come about. All this is set forth in
these Notes, to show how uncertain, unseemly, defective, or vain are the be-
ginnings of the nations.
44 Moreover this Table takes a position quite opposed to that of the
Chronological Canon [Canon chronicon, aegyptiacus, hebraicus, graecus] of
John Marsham, in which he tries to prove that the Egyptians preceded all the
nations of the world in government and religion, and that their sacred rites
and civil ordinances, transported to other peoples, were received with some
emendation by the Hebrews. In this opinion he was followed by [John] Spencer
in his dissertation De Urim et Tummim, in which he expresses the opinion that
the Israelites had taken from the Egyptians all their science of divine things by
means of the sacred Cabala. Finally Marsham was acclaimed by van Heurn in
his Antiquitates philosophiae barbaricae, in which, in the part entitled Chal-
daicus, he writes that Moses, instructed in the knowledge of them by the
Egyptians, had brought divine things to the Hebrews in his kws. Against this
line of argument arose Hermann Wits in his Aegyptiaca. He thinks that the first
gentile author to give us reliable information about the Egyptians was Dion
28 THE NEW SCIENCE
Cassias, who flourished under the philosopher Marcus Aurelius. But on this
point he may be confuted by the Annals of Tacitus, in which we are told that
Germanicus, having gone into the East, proceeded thence to Egypt to see the
famous antiquities of Thebes, and had one of the priests there interpret to him
the hieroglyphs inscribed on some of the monuments. The priest, talking
foolishly, told him that those characters preserved the memory of the boundless
power that their king Ramses had held in Africa, in the East and even in Asia
Minor, equal to the power of the Romans in their own time, which was very
great. But this passage, perhaps because it was contrary to his position, Wits said
nothing about.
45 But certainly such boundless antiquity did not yield much recondite
wisdom to the inland Egyptians. For in the time of Clement of Alexandria, as
he recounts in his Miscellanies [Stromata], their so-called "priestly" books were
in circulation to the number of forty-two, and they contained the greatest errors
in philosophy and astronomy, for which Chaeremon, teacher of St. Dionysius
the Areopagite, is often scoffed at by Strabo. Their ideas about medicine are
found by Galen in his discussion of Hermetic medicine to be obvious nonsense
and mere quackery. Their morality was dissolute, for it not only tolerated or
permitted harlots but made them respectable. Their theology was full of super-
stition, magic and witchcraft. And the magnificence of their pyramids and other
monuments might well have sprung from barbarism, which accords well with
hugeness. Egyptian sculpture and casting are regarded even today as extremely
crude. For delicacy is the fruit of philosophy, wherefore Greece alone, which
was the nation of philosophers, shone with all the fine arts that human genius
has ever discovered: painting, sculpture, casting, and the arts of engraving,
which are most delicate because they are compelled to abstract the surfaces of
the bodies they represent.
46 This ancient wisdom of the Egyptians was raised to the stars by
Alexandria, founded on the sea by Alexander the Great. Uniting African acute-
ness with Greek delicacy, it produced distinguished philosophers in divinity,
through whom the city gained such renown for high divine wisdom that the
Alexandrian Museum was later as much celebrated as the Academy, the Lyceum,
the Stoa and the Cynosarges all together had been in Athens. Alexandria was
called on this account "the mother of the sciences." Such was its excellence that
the Greeks called it simply Polls, "The City," as Athens was called Astu and
Rome Urbs. Thence came Manetho, the Egyptian high priest, who turned all
Egyptian history into a sublime natural theology, just as the Greek philosophers
had previously done with their fables, which will here be found to have been
their most ancient histories. This explains why the same thing happened to the
Greek fables as to the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
47 With such a show of high wisdom, the nation, arrogant by nature
(and hence mockingly called "animals of glory"), in a city which was a great
emporium of the Mediterranean and, through the Red Sea, of the Ocean and
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 29
the Indies (a city among whose abominable customs was that related by Tacitus
in a golden passage, that it was "avid of new religions"), believed that the
false gods which were scattered abroad in the world (as they learned from the
nations which met there for maritime trade) must all have originated in their
Egypt, and that their Jove Ammon was the oldest of all Joves (of which every
gentile nation had one), and that the Herculeses of all the other nations
(Varro enumerated as many as forty) must have taken their names from their
Egyptian Hercules. These [pretensions], both reported to us by Tacitus, were
due in part to the prejudiced opinion of their exceptional antiquity, which they
vainly boasted over all other nations of the world, adding that in ancient times
they had lorded it over a great part of the world. They were due in part also to
their not knowing the way in which uniform ideas of gods and heroes were
born among the gentile peoples without their having any knowledge of each
other, as we shall fully demonstrate later on. Now for all the too flattering judg-
ments with which Diodorus Siculus (who lived in the times of Augustus)
adorns the Egyptians, he does not accord them more than two thousand years
of antiquity, and his judgments are overthrown by Jacques Cappel in his His-
toria sacra et exotica, who puts them in the same class with those which Xeno-
phon had ascribed to Cyrus (and we may add those which Plato often feigns of
the Persians). Finally all this concerning the vanity of the high ancient wis-
dom of the Egyptians is confirmed by the hoax of the Poimander, palmed off as
Hermetic doctrine. Saumaise considered this fragment a disordered and badly
composed collection of things, and Casaubon found that it contained no doc-
trine more ancient than that which the Platonists set forth in the same phrase-
ology.
48 This false opinion of their great antiquity was caused among the
Egyptians by a property of the human mind that of being indefinite by which
it is often led to believe that the things it does not know are vastly greater than
in fact they are. The Egyptians were in this respect like the Chinese, who grew
up into such a great nation cut off from all foreign nations, for the Egyptians
were similarly cut off until Psammeticus, and the Scythians until Idanthyrsus.
The latter indeed, according to a vulgar tradition, surpassed the Egyptians in
antiquity. This vulgar tradition must have taken its start from [the legendary
episode] with which profane universal history begins. It sets up, in Justin's ver-
sion, as two pre-beginnings antedating the monarchy of the Assyrians, two
powerful kings, Tanaus the Scythian and Sesostris the Egyptian, who have until
now made the world seem older than it really is. [The story goes] that Tanaus
had moved first through the East with a great army to subdue Egypt, which
is by nature very difficult to penetrate with an army, and that then Sesostris
with an equally great host had moved to subdue Scythia. Yet Scythia lived un-
known to the Persians themselves (who had extended their monarchy over
that of the Medes, their neighbors) down to the time of Darius called the Great,
who declared war on Idanthyrsus, king of the Scythians; and this king was
30 THE NEW SCIENCE
so barbarous even in the days of a most civilized Persia that he answered him
with five real words in the form of five objects, since he did not even know how
to write with hieroglyphs. And we are to believe that these two great and mighty
kings crossed Asia with two great hosts without making it a province either of
Scythia or Egypt, but leaving it in such liberty that there later grew up there the
first of the four most famous monarchies in the world, that of Assyria !
49 For the same reason, perhaps, the Chaldeans did not fail to enter
the lists in this contest of antiquity. They too were an inland people and, as
we shall show, more ancient than the other two, who vainly boasted that they
had preserved the astronomical observations of a good twenty-eight thousand
years. This was perhaps the reason that Flavius Josephus the Jew erroneously
regarded as antediluvian the observations described on the two columns, one
of marble and one of brick, raised against the two floods, and thought that he
himself had seen the marble one in Syria. So important was it to the ancient na-
tions to preserve astronomical records, whereas this sense was quite dead among
the nations that followed them! Wherefore this column finds its proper place in
the museum of credulity.
50 But the Chinese are found writing in hieroglyphs just as the ancient
Egyptians did (to say nothing of the Scythians, who did not even know
how to put their hieroglyphs in writing). For many thousands of years
they had no commerce with other nations by whom they might have been in-
formed concerning the real antiquity of the world. Just as a man confined while
asleep in a very small dark room, in horror of darkness [on waking] believes it
certainly much larger than groping with his hands will show it to be, so, in the
darkness of their chronology, the Chinese and the Egyptians have done, and
the Chaldeans likewise. It is true that Father Michele Ruggieri, a Jesuit, de-
clares that he has himself read books printed before the coming of Jesus Christ.
It is true further that Father Martini, another Jesuit, in his Sinica historia as-
cribes a great antiquity to Confucius, which has led many into atheism, as we
are informed by Martin Schoock in his Diluvium Noachi universale, in which
he says that Isaac de la Peyrere, author of the Prcadamitae, perhaps for that
reason abandoned the Catholic faith and then wrote that the flood spread over
the lands of the Hebrews only. Nevertheless Nicolas Trigault, better informed
than Ruggieri or Martini, writes in his De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas
that printing was in use in China not more than two centuries earlier than in
Europe, and that Confucius flourished not more than five hundred years be-
fore Christ. And the Confucian philosophy, like the priestly books of the
Egyptians, in its few references to physical nature is crude and clumsy, and it
turns almost entirely on a vulgar moral code, that is to say on morals com-
manded to the people by laws.
51 Premising such reflections on the vain opinion of their own antiquity
held by these gentile nations and above all by the Egyptians, we should begin
our study of gentile learning [tutto lo scibile gentilesco] by scientifically ascer-
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 31
taining this important starting-point where and when that learning had its
first beginnings in the world and by adducing human reasons thereby in sup-
port of Christian faith [tutto il credibile cristiano], which takes its start from
the fact that the first people of the world were the Hebrews, whose prince was
Adam, created by the true God at the time of the creation of the world. It fol-
lows that the first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpreta-
tion of fables; for, as we shall see, all the histories of the gentiles have their be-
ginnings in fables, which were the first histories of the gentile nations. By such
a method the beginnings of the sciences as well as of the nations are to be dis-
covered, for they sprang from the nations and from no other source. It will
be shown throughout this work that they had their beginnings in the public
needs or utilities of the peoples and that they were later perfected as acute in-
dividuals applied their reflection to them. This is the proper starting-point for
universal history, which all scholars say is defective in its beginnings.
52 In this undertaking we shall be greatly helped by the antiquity of
the Egyptians, for they have preserved for us two great fragments not less
marvelous than their pyramids, namely these two great philological verities.
The first is narrated by Herodotus: that the Egyptians reduced all the preced-
ing time of the world to three ages, the first that of the gods, the second that
of the heroes, the third that of men. The other (as related in Scheffer's
De natura et constitutions philosophiae italicae seu pythagoricae) is that,
with corresponding number and sequence, through all that period three lan-
guages had been spoken: the first hieroglyphic, with sacred characters; the
second symbolic, with heroic characters; the third epistolary, with characters
agreed on by the people. This division of time was not followed by Marcus
Terentius Varro; we must not say because he did not know of it, for, with his
boundless erudition, he deserved the honor bestowed on him in the title "most
learned of the Romans" in their most enlightened period, the age of Cicero; but
rather because he did not choose to; perhaps because he applied [only] to
Roman history what by our principles will be found true of all the ancient na-
tions, namely that all Roman things, divine and human, were native to Latium.
He therefore studied to give them all Latin origins in his great work on things
divine and human [Antiquitates], of which the injustice of time has deprived
us (yet Varro believed in the legendary bringing of the law of the Twelve
Tables from Athens to Rome!). He divided the times of the world into three:
a dark age, corresponding to the Egyptian age of the gods; a fabulous age, cor-
responding to their age of the heroes; and a historic age, corresponding to their
age of men.
53 Furthermore the antiquity of the Egyptians will help us with two pre-
tentious memories, examples of that national self-conceit by which, as Diodorus
Siculus observed, every nation barbarian or civilized has considered itself to be
the oldest and to have preserved its records from the beginning of the world; a
privilege, as we shall see, of the Hebrews alone. These two pretentious
3 i THE NEW SCIENCE
memories we have observed to be, first, the legend that their Jove Ammon was
the oldest of all the Joves in the world, and second, that the Herculeses of all
the other nations had taken their name from the Egyptian Hercules. That is,
that all nations had passed first through the age of gods, the king of whom was
by all these nations held to be Jove; and then through the age of heroes, who
were considered sons of the gods, and of whom Hercules was believed to be
the greatest.
II
[The Hebrews]
54 The first column is dedicated to the Hebrews, who, on the most re-
liable authority of Flavius Josephus, the Jew, and Lactantius Firmianus, to be
cited later, lived unknown to all the gentile nations. And yet they reckoned
rightly the account of the times passed through by the world, now accepted as
true by the severest critics, according to the calculation of Philo the Jew. If
his estimate varies from that of Eusebius, the deviation is one of a mere fifteen
hundred years, which is a very short period of time compared with the varia-
tions among the calculations made by the Chaldeans, Scythians, Egyptians,
and in our own day by the Chinese. And this should be an invincible proof that
the Hebrews were the first people in our world and that in the sacred history
they have accurately preserved their memories from the very beginning of the
world.
Ill
[The Chaldeans]
55 The second column is devoted to the Chaldeans, both because in
geography it is clear that the most inland monarchy of all the habitable world
must have been in Assyria, and because in this work it is shown that the inland
nations were populated first, and then the maritime nations. And certainly
the Chaldeans were the first gentile sages, and the common opinion of philo-
logians regards Zoroaster the Chaldean as their prince. And without question
universal history takes its beginning from the monarchy of the Assyrians, which
must have begun to take shape among the Chaldean people; from whom, when
it had grown to great size, it must have passed to the nation of the Assyrians
under Ninus, who must have founded that monarchy not with people brought
in from outside but with those born within Chaldea itself, whereupon he did
away with the Chaldean name and brought forward the Assyrian in its stead. It
must have been the plebeians of that nation through whose support Ninus made
himself king. It will be shown in this work that such was the political custom
in almost all nations, as we know certainly it was of the Roman. Now the same
[universal] history tells us that Zoroaster was slain by Ninus. We shall see that
this was said, in heroic language, in the sense that the kingdom of the Chal-
deans which had been aristocratic (and of which Zoroaster had been the heroic
character) was overthrown by means of the popular liberty of the plebeians of
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 33
that people. We shall see that in heroic times these plebeians were a different
nation from the nobles, and that with the aid of this nation Ninus established
himself as monarch. Otherwise, if things are not as we have stated them, this
monster of chronology would emerge in Assyrian history: that within the life-
time of one man, Zoroaster, Chaldea had grown from [a land of] lawless vaga-
bonds to such greatness of empire that Ninus was able to found on it a mighty
monarchy. For lack of these principles, Ninus, taken as the initiator of universal
history, has hitherto made the monarchy of Assyria seem to have been born
all at once, as a frog is born in a summer shower.
IV
[The Scythians]
56 The third column is set up for the Scythians, who surpassed the
Egyptians in antiquity, as we learned not far back [48] from a vulgar tradi-
tion.
V
[The Phoenicians]
57 The fourth column is assigned to the Phoenicians rather than to the
Egyptians, to whom the Phoenicians brought from the Chaldeans the use of
the quadrant and the knowledge of the elevation of the pole. Of so much there
is a vulgar tradition. We shall show later that they brought also vulgar
[alphabetic] characters.
VI
[The Egyptians]
58 For all the reasons discussed above, the Egyptians, to whom Marsham
in his Canon accords the distinction of being the most ancient of all the na-
tions, merit the fifth place in our Chronological Table.
VII
[Zoroaster, or the kingdom of the Chaldeans. Year of the world 1756.]
59 Zoroaster is shown in this work to have been a poetic character of
founders of peoples in the East. There are as many of these founders scattered
through that great part of the world as there are Herculeses scattered through
the opposite part, the West. And perhaps the Herculeses whom Varro observed
to exist in the likeness of the western ones even in Asia, such as the Tyrian o r
Phoenician, must have been considered by the easterners as so many Zoroasters.
But the vanity of scholars, who will have it that whatever they know is as an-
cient as the world, has made of them one individual man brimming with the
highest esoteric wisdom, and has attached to him the oracles of philosophy,
which do nothing but palm off as ancient a very modern doctrine, namely that
of the Pythagoreans and the Platonists. But this vanity of the scholars did not
stop here, for it swelled even further by deriving from him the scholastic sue-
34 THE NEW SCIENCE
cession among the nations. According to them, Zoroaster taught Berosus for
Chaldea; Berosus, Hermes Trismegistus for Egypt; Hermes Trismegistus, Atlas
for Ethiopia; Atlas, Orpheus for Thrace; and finally Orpheus founded his school
in Greece. But we shall see shortly how [far from] easy these long journeys were
for the ancient nations, who, because of their recent savage origin, lived every-
where unknown even to their nearest neighbors, and came to know each other
only by occasion of war or by reason of trade.
60 But concerning the Chaldeans the philologians themselves, confused
by the various vulgar traditions which they have themselves collected, do not
know whether they were individual men or entire families or a whole people
or nation. All these doubts will be resolved by the following principles. They
were first individuals, then entire families, later a whole people and finally a
great nation on which the monarchy of Assyria was founded. Their wisdom was
at first in vulgar divinity, by means of which they divined the future from the
path of falling stars at night, and then in judicial astrology. Thus among the
Latins a judicial astrologer was still called a Chaldean.
VIII
[lapetus, from whom spring the giants. Year of the world 1856.]
61 Giants, as we shall show by physical histories found in the Greek
fables and by proofs both physical and moral drawn from civil histories, existed
in nature among all the first gentile nations.
IX
[Nimrod, or the confusion of tongues. Year of the world 1856.]
62 The confusion of tongues came about in a miraculous way so that
on the instant many different languages were formed. The Fathers will have it
that through this confusion of tongues the purity of the sacred antediluvian lan-
guage was gradually lost. This should be understood as referring to the lan-
guages of the Eastern peoples among whom Shem propagated the human race.
It must have been otherwise in the case of the nations of all the rest of the
world; for the races of Ham and Japheth were destined to be scattered through
the great forest of this earth in a savage migration of two hundred years. Wan-
dering and alone, they were to bring forth their children, with a savage educa-
tion, destitute of any human custom and deprived of any human speech, and
so in a state of wild animals. It was necessary that just so much time should pass
before the earth, having at last dried off from the wetness of the universal flood,
could send off dry exhalations of the sort wherein lightning could be generated,
which stunned and terrified men into abandoning themselves to the false re-
ligions of so many Joves that Varro was able to count forty of them, and the
Egyptians claimed their Jove Ammon to be the oldest of all. They turned to a
kind of divination which consisted in divining the future from the thunder and
lightning and from the flights of eagles which they held to be birds of Jove.
But among the Easterners there was born a more refined divination from the
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 35
observation of the movements of the planets and the aspects of the stars. Thus
Zoroaster is honored as the first wise man among the gentiles. Bochart gives him
the title "contemplator of the stars." Just as the first vulgar wisdom was born
among the Easterners, so also among them arose the first monarchy, that of As-
syria.
63 This chain of reasoning disposes of all those recent etymologists who
attempt to trace all the languages of the world back to the origins of the
eastern tongues. The fact is that all the nations sprung from rlam and Japheth
first developed their native languages inland, and [only] then, having de-
scended to the sea, began to deal with the Phoenicians, who were famous for
navigation and colonies along the shores of the Mediterranean and of the Ocean.
We have shown in the first edition of our New Science that this is true of the
origins of the Latin language and that, by analogy with the Latin, it must hold
for all the others as well.
X
[One of these giants, Prometheus, steals fire from the sun. Year of the world 1856.]
64 From this fable we perceive that Heaven reigned on earth, when it
was believed to be no higher than the mountain tops, according to the vulgar
tradition that also tells that it left great and numerous benefits to the human
race.
XI
[Deucalion]
65 In those times Themis, or divine justice, had a temple on Mount
Parnassus, and she judged on earth the affairs of mortals.
XII
[Hermes Trismegistus the elder, or the Egyptian age of the gods.]
66 This is the Hermes who, on the authority of Cicero, On the Nature
of the Gods, was called by the Egyptians [Thoth or] Theuth (from which the
Greeks are said to have derived theos), and who brought the Egyptians letters
and laws. They in turn (according to Marsham) taught them to the other na-
tions of the world. But the Greeks did not write their laws with hieroglyphs but
with vulgar letters, which up to now Cadmus has commonly been thought to
have brought to them from Phoenicia, though, as we shall see, they made no use
of them for seven hundred years and more thereafter. For within this period
there came Homer, who in none of his poems so much as mentions nomos
(as Feith observed in his Antiquitates homericae), and who left his poems to
the memory of his rhapsodes because in his time vulgar letters had not yet been
discovered, as Flavius Josephus the Jew resolutely maintains against Apion, the
Greek grammarian. Moreover, after Homer, Greek letters turned out so dif-
ferent from Phoenician!
67 But these are minor difficulties by comparison with the following:
36 THE NEW SCIENCE
how can there be nations already founded and yet without laws? and how
within Egypt itself, before this Hermes, had the dynasties been founded? As if
letters were essential to laws, and as if the laws of Sparta were thus not laws,
where a law of Lycurgus himself forbade the knowledge of letters! As if the
following order were impossible in civil nature: to devise laws orally and orally
to publish them' As if we did not in fact find in Homer two sorts of assembly:
one, called the bottle, secret, where the heroes met to consult by word of mouth
about the laws; and another called the agora, public, in which, also by word of
mouth, the laws were published! And as if, finally, providence had not made
provision for this human necessity: so that, lacking letters, all nations in their
barbarian period were first founded on customs, and [only] later, having be-
come civilized, were governed by [statutory] laws! Just as in the second bar-
barian period the first laws of the new nations of Europe were born in cus-
toms, of which the feudal are the most ancient. This should be remembered
because of what we shall have to say later: that fiefs were the first origins of all
the laws that grew up later among all nations both ancient and modern, and
hence the natural law of nations was established not with [statutory] laws but
with these same human customs.
68 Now as to what touches on that great theme of the Christian religion
that Moses did not learn from the Egyptians the sublime theology of the He-
brews there seems to be one great obstacle, chronology, which places Moses
after Hermes Trismegistus. But this difficulty, besides being met by the reasons
set forth above, is completely overcome by means of the principles expressed
in a really golden passage of lamblichus, DC my sterns aegyptiorum, where he
says that the Egyptians ascribed to this same Hermes all they discovered that was
necessary or useful to human civil life. He must therefore have been, not an
individual man rich in esoteric wisdom who was subsequently made a god,
but a poetic character of the first men of Egypt who were wise in vulgar wis-
dom and who founded there first the families and then the peoples that finally
went to make up this great nation. From this same passage just cited from
lamblichus it follows that, if the Egyptian division stands of the three ages of
gods, heroes and men, and their Trismegistus was a god, then the life of this
Hermes must embrace the entire Egyptian age of the gods.
XIII
[The golden age, or the Greek age of the gods]
69 Legendary history acquaints us with one of the peculiarities of this
age, namely that the gods associated with men on earth. To give certainty to
the principles of chronology, we shall consider in this work a natural theogony
or generation of the gods, formed naturally in the imaginations of the Greeks
on certain occasions of human need or utility, in which they felt they had re-
ceived help or comfort in the early childhood of the world, when it was over-
whelmed by most frightful religions. For whatever men saw or imagined, or
BOOK L ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 37
even did themselves, they took to be divinity. Now by making twelve short
epochs of the twelve famous gentile gods who were called greater, that is the
gods consecrated by men in the time of the families, a rational chronology of
poetic history leads us to assign to the age of the gods a duration of nine hun-
dred years. This gives us the beginnings of universal profane history.
XIV
[Hellen son of Deucalion, grandson of Prometheus, great grandson of lapetus through his
three sons, spreads three dialects in Greece. Year of the world 2082.]
70 From this Hellen the native Greeks were called Hellenes; but the
Greeks of Italy were called Graii and their land Graikia, whence they were
called Graeci by the Latins. So well did the Greeks of Italy know the name of
the mother country beyond the sea, whence they had come as colonists into
Italy! For no such word as Graikia is found in any Greek writer, as Jacques Le
Paulmier observes in his Graeclae antiquae descriptio.
XV
[Cecrops the Egyptian brings twelve colonies into Attica, of which Theseus later makes up
Athens.]
71 When Strabo judges on the contrary that Attica, because of its rocky
soil, could not attract foreigners to come and live there, he does so in order to
support the further assertion that the Attic dialect is one of the first among the
native dialects of Greece.
XVI
[Cadmus the Phoenician founds Thebes in Boeotia and introduces vulgar letters into Greece.
Year of the world 2491.]
72 Since he introduced the Phoenician alphabet there, Boeotia should
have been from its literate beginnings the most ingenious of all the nations of
Greece; but it produced men of such doltish minds that "Boeotian" became a
proverbial term for a man of slow wit.
XVII
[Saturn, or the Latin age of the gods. Year of the world 2491.]
73 This is the age of the gods beginning among the nations of Latium
and corresponding in character to the golden age of the Greeks, among whom
our [science of] mythology will show that the first gold was grain, by the har-
vests of which for many centuries the first nations counted their years. Saturn
was so called by the Latins from sati, "sown" [fields], and is called Chronos by
the Greeks, among whom chronos means "time," whence comes the word
chronology.
XVIII
[Hermes Trismegistus the younger, or the Egyptian age of the heroes. Year of the world 2553.]
74 This Hermes the younger must be a poetic character of the age of
the heroes in Egypt. This age in Greece comes only after an age of the gods
38 THE NEW SCIENCE
lasting nine hundred years; but among the Egyptians the age of the gods lasts
only through the time of a father, son and grandson. Corresponding to this
anachronism in Egyptian history we have already noticed a similar one in As-
syrian history, the case of Zoroaster.
XIX
[Danaus the Egyptian drives the Inachids out of the kingdom of Argos. Year of the world 2553.]
75 These royal successions are great canons of chronology: thus Danaus
occupies the kingdom of Argos, which had previously been ruled by nine kings
of the house of Inachus, during whose time there must have passed three hun-
dred years (according to the rule of the chronologers), as there must have
passed nearly five hundred years during the time of the fourteen Latin kings
who reigned in Alba.
76 But Thucydides says that in heroic times the kings drove one another
off the throne almost daily; as Amulius drives Numitor from the kingdom of
Alba and Romulus then dethrones Amulius and restores Numitor. This came
about through the savagery of those times, and also because the heroic cities
were without walls, nor were fortresses then in use. We shall see later that this
was true also of the second barbarian period.
XX
[The Herachds, spread abroad through Greece, bring in the age of the heroes there. Curetes
in Crete, in Saturnia or Italy, and in Asia, bring in the kingdoms of priests. Year of the world
2682.]
77 These two great fragments of antiquity, as Denis Petau observes, fall
in Greek history before the heroic age of the Greeks. The Heraclids or sons of
Hercules are scattered abroad through Greece more than a hundred years be-
fore the coming of Hercules their father, whereas, in order to propagate so
many descendants, he would have had to be born many centuries earlier.
XXI
[Dido of Tyre goes to found Carthage.]
78 We place her at the end of the heroic age of the Phoenicians, and thus
[conceive her to have been] driven out of Tyre because she had been con-
quered in a heroic contest, as she professes to have left the city on account
of the hatred of her brother-in-law. This multitude of Tyrian men was called
in heroic diction a woman because it was made up of the weak and vanquished.
XXII
[Orpheus, and with him the age of the theological poets.]
79 This Orpheus, who reduces the wild beasts of Greece to humanity,
is evidently a vast den of a thousand monsters. He comes from Thrace, a coun-
try of fierce warriors [Marti, Marses], not of humane philosophers, for the
Thracians were through all later time so barbarous that Androtion the philos-
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 39
opher removed Orpheus from the number of sages simply because he had been
born in Thrace. And [yet] in her beginnings he came forth so skilled in the
Greek language that he composed in it verses of marvellous poetry, with which
he tamed the barbarians through their ears; for though already organized in
nations they were not restrained by their eyes from setting fire to cities full of
marvels. And he finds the Greeks still wild beasts [though] Deucalion a thou-
sand years before had taught them piety by his reverence and fear of divine
justice. On Mount Parnassus, in front of the temple raised to divine justice
(which was later the dwelling of the Muses and Apollo, the god and the arts of
humanity), Deucalion with Pyrrha his wife, both with veiled heads (that is,
with the modesty of human cohabitation, meaning marriage), seize the stones
that lie before their feet (that is, the stupid brutes of the former savage times)
and make them into men by throwing them over their shoulders, (that is, by
the discipline of household economy in the state of the families). Hellen too,
seven hundred years before, had brought [the Greeks] together by means of
language and had sown the three dialects among them by means of his three
sons. And the house of Inachus could show that it had founded its kingdoms
three centuries before and had continued the royal successions through that
period. Finally comes Orpheus to teach the Greeks humanity; and, from the
savage condition in which he finds it, he brings Greece into such splendor as a
nation that he is a companion of Jason on the naval enterprise of the Golden
Fleece (naval enterprises and navigation being the last discoveries of peoples),
and he is accompanied on this expedition by Castor and Pollux, the brothers of
Helen, for whose sake the famous Trojan war was fought. So, in the life of
one man, so many civil things [are] accomplished, for which the extent of a
thousand years would hardly suffice! Such a monstrosity of Greek chronology
in the person of Orpheus is like the other two we have observed above: one
in Assyrian history in the person of Zoroaster, and another in Egyptian history
in the two Hermeses. It was perhaps because of all this that Cicero in his On
the Nature of the Gods suspected that such a person as Orpheus never existed
in the world.
80 To these great chronological difficulties may be added others no less
serious of a moral and political nature. For Orpheus then founds the humanity
of Greece on the examples of an adulterous Jove, a Juno who is the mortal
enemy of the virtues of the Herculeses, a chaste Diana who solicits the sleeping
Endymions at night, an Apollo who gives oracular responses and pursues to the
point of death modest maiden Daphnes, a Mars who, as if it were not enough
for the gods to commit adultery on earth, carries it even into the sea with Venus.
Nor is this unrestrained licentiousness of the gods satisfied by forbidden inter-
course with women: Jove burns with wicked love for Ganymede; indeed this
lust reaches the point of bestiality and Jove, transformed irco a swan, lies with
Leda. This licentiousness, practiced on men and beasts, was precisely the in-
40 THE NEW SCIENCE
famous evil of the outlaw world. Many of the gods and goddesses in heaven do
not contract matrimony at all. One marriage there is, that of Jove and Juno,
and it is sterile; and not only sterile but full of atrocious wrangling. Jove indeed
fixes in the air his chaste and jealous wife and he himself gives birth to Minerva,
who springs from his head. And finally Saturn, if he begets children, devours
them. Such examples, powerful divine examples as they are (though such
fables may contain all the recondite wisdom desired by Plato and in our time
by Bacon of Verulam in his Wisdom of the Ancients [De sapientia veterum\),
if taken at face value would corrupt the most civilized peoples and would incite
them to become as bestial as the very beasts of Orpheus; so apt and efficacious
they are to transform men from the state of beasts to that of humanity! In view
of these things it is a very slight reproof that Saint Augustine makes of the
gods of the gentiles in his City of God, apropos of the scene in the Eunuch of
Terence in which Chaerea, tempted by a painting of Jove lying with Danae in
a shower of gold, summons up the hardihood, which he had lacked, to violate
the slave girl with whom he was so madly and violently in love.
81 But these treacherous reefs of mythology will be avoided by the prin-
ciples of this Science, which will show that such fables in their beginnings were
all true and severe and worthy of the founders of nations, and only later (when
the long passage of years had obscured their meanings, and customs had
changed from austere to dissolute, and because men to console their consciences
wanted to sin with the authority of the gods) came to have the obscene mean-
ings with which they have come down to us. As for the rough chronological
tempests, they will be cleared up for us by the discovery of poetic characters,
one of whom was Orpheus, considered as a poet theologian, who through the
fables, in their first meaning, first founded and then confirmed the humanity
of Greece. This character stood out more clearly than ever in the heroic con-
tests with the plebeians of the Greek cities. That was the age in which the poet
theologians distinguished themselves, as for example Orpheus himself, Linus,
Musaeus, and Amphion. The last of these, with self-moving stones (i.e. the
doltish plebeians) erected the walls of Thebes, which Cadmus had founded three
hundred years before; just as Appius, grandson of the decemvir, about as long
after the foundation of Rome, fortifies the heroic state for the Romans by sing-
ing to the plebs the strength of the gods in the auspices, the knowledge of which
was held by the patricians. From such heroic contests the heroic age got its
name.
XXIII
[Hercules, with whom the heroic time of Greece reaches its climax]
82 The same difficulties recur for Hercules if we take him for a real
man, the companion of Jason in the expedition to Colchis, and not, as we shall
find him to be in respect of his labors, a heroic character of the founder of
peoples.
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 41
XXIV
[Sancuniates writes histories in vulgar letters. Year of the world 2800.]
83 Called also Sanchuniathon and entitled "the historian of truth" (on
the authority of Clement of Alexandria in his Stromata). He wrote the history
of Phoenicia in vulgar characters, while the Egyptians and the Scythians, as
we have seen, wrote in hieroglyphs, as the Chinese have been found to do down
to our own days. The latter, like the Scythians and the Egyptians, boasted a
monstrous antiquity because in the darkness of their isolation, having no deal-
ings with other nations, they had no true idea of time. And Sancuniates wrote
in vulgar Phoenician characters at a time when vulgar letters had not yet come
into use among the Greeks, as we have said above.
XXV
[Trojan war. Year of the world 2820.]
84 This war, as it is recounted by Homer, is thought by circumspect
critics never to have taken place; and authors like Dictys of Crete and Dares of
Phrygia, who as historians of their time gave prose accounts of it, are by these
same critics relegated to the library of impostur.
XXVI
[Sesostris reigns in Thebes. Year of the world 2949.]
85 This king brought under his empire the three other dynasties of
Egypt, and is evidently the king Ramses of whom the Egyptian priest tells
Germanicus in Tacitus.
XXVII
[Greek colonies in Asia, in Sicily, in Italy. Year of the world 2949.]
86 This is one of the very few things in which we do not follow the
authority of chronology. Constrained by an overpowering reason, we put the
colonies brought by the Greeks into Italy and Sicily about a hundred years after
the Trojan War, and thus three hundred years before the time at which the
chronologists place them; that is, about the time where the chronologists place
the wanderings of the heroes such as Menelaus, Aeneas, Antenor, Diomed and
Ulysses. Nor should this cause surprise when they [the chronologists] them-
selves vary as much as four hundred and sixty years in dating Homer, the author
nearest to these affairs of the Greeks. [Our reason is that] in magnificence and
delicacy Syracuse at the time of the Punic wars had nothing to envy Athens
itself, and luxury and splendor of customs reach the islands later than the
continents. The Croton of Livy's time calls forth his compassion because of its
small number of inhabitants, when it had once had a population of several
million.
42 THE NEW SCIENCE
XXVIII
[Olympic games, first founded by Hercules, then suspended, and restored by Isiphilus. Year
of the world 3223.]
87 Since it is found that the years were numbered by Hercules from
harvest to harvest, but from Isiphilus [i.e. Iphitus] on by the course of the sun
through the signs of the zodiac, exact chronology among the Greeks begins with
Isiphilus.
XXIX
[Founding of Rome. Year of Rome i.]
88 But just as the clouds are dispersed by the sun, so all the magnificent
opinions that have been held up to now concerning the beginnings of Rome and
of all the other cities that have been capitals of famous nations, are dispersed by
this golden passage of Varro (quoted by St. Augustine in his City of God): that
Rome under the kings, who reigned there for two hundred and fifty years, sub-
dued more than twenty peoples and did not extend her empire more than
twenty miles.
XXX
[Homer, who came at a time when vulgar letters had not yet been invented, and who never
saw Egypt. Year of the world 3290, of Rome 35.]
89 Regarding this first light of Greece we have been left in the dark by
Greek history in both its chief aspects, geography and chronology, for nothing
certain has come down to us regarding either his fatherland or the age in which
he lived. In our third book we shall find him quite different from what he has
been thought up to now. But, whoever he was, he certainly never saw Egypt;
for he says in the Odyssey that the island on which there now stands the pharos
of Alexandria was as far from the mainland as an unloaded boat with a north
wind in the poop could sail in an entire day. Nor did he see Phoenicia; for he
says that the island of Calypso, Ogygia, was so far away that Mercury, a god
and a winged god could get there only with great difficulty, as if it were as
far from Greece (where the gods reside on Mt. Olympus, as he himself sings in
the Iliad) as America is from our world. So, if the Greeks in the times of Homer
had had dealings with Egypt and Phoenicia, he would have lost credit in both
his poems.
XXXI
[Psammeticus opens Egypt, but only to the Ionian and Carian Greeks. Year of the world 3334.]
90 It is from the time of Psammeticus that Herodotus begins to relate
better ascertained facts about the Egyptians. This confirms our opinion that
Homer did not see Egypt; and the various items of information that he nar-
rates about Egypt and other countries of the world are either things and deeds
that took place within Greece, as we shall show in our [section on] Poetic
Geography, or they are traditions, altered by the passage of a long time, of the
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 43
Phoenicians, Egyptians and Phrygians who had colonized among the Greeks;
or they are tales of Phoenician travelers who traded on Greek shores long be-
fore the time of Homer.
XXXII
[Aesop, vulgar moral philosopher. Year of the world 3334.]
91 In the [section on] Poetic Logic it will be found that Aesop was not
an individual man in nature, but an imaginative type or poetic character of the
socii or famuli of the heroes, who certainly came before the Seven Sages of
Greece.
XXXIII
[Seven Sages of Greece: of whom one, Solon, ordains popular liberty in Athens; another,
Thales the Milesian, gives a beginning to philosophy with physics. Year of the world 3406.]
92 Thales began with too simple a principle: water; perhaps because he
had seen gourds grow on water.
XXXIV
[Pythagoras, of whom, according to Livy, not so much as the name can have been known at
Rome during his lifetime. Year of the world 3468, of Rome 225.]
93 Livy puts him in the time of Servius Tullius (so firmly did he be-
lieve that Pythagoras had been the teacher of Numa in divinity!); and in these
very times of Servius Tullius, almost two hundred years after Numa, he says
that it was impossible, because of the barbarous character of inland Italy in that
era, not merely for Pythagoras himself but even for his name to reach Rome
from Croton, passing through so many peoples of varying languages and cus-
toms. It may thence be inferred how quick and easy were the really long
journeys of Pythagoras to visit the disciples of Orpheus in Thrace, the mages
in Persia, the Chaldeans in Babylonia, the gymnosophists in India; then, on
his return, the priests of Egypt and, after crossing Africa at its widest, the
disciples of Atlas in Mauritania; then, crossing the sea, the Druids in Gaul!
Thence he is supposed to have returned to his fatherland, rich in what van
Heurn calls barbarian wisdom from those barbarous nations to which, long
years before, Hercules the Theban, slaying monsters and tyrants, had gone on
his civilizing mission about the world; nations to whom the Greeks bragged, a
long time after, that they had taught culture, but not to such profit that they
did not remain barbarous. So sound and weighty is the succession of the schools
of barbarian philosophy related by the aforesaid van Heurn, which the vanity
of scholars has so much applauded!
94 Need we go so far as to appeal here to the authority of Lactantius,
who firmly denies thatTythagoras was the disciple of Isaiah? This authority is
strongly supported by a passage in the Jewish Antiquities [XII, 2, 14] of Joscphus
the Jew, which proves that the Hebrews in the times of Ho.ner and Pythagoras
lived unknown to their nearest inland neighbors, to say nothing of remote na-
tions overseas. For when Ptolemy Philadelphus expressed surprise that no poet
44 THE NEW SCIENCE
or historian had ever made any mention of the Mosaic laws, Demetrius the Jew
answered that some who had attempted to tell the gentiles about them had
been miraculously punished by God; Theopompus for example had lost his
mind and Theodectes his sight. Josephus himself [Against Apion I, 12] freely
admits their obscurity and gives these reasons for it: "We do not live," he says,
"on the seashore, nor do we delight in trading or in having dealings with
foreigners for the sake of trade." Lactantius reflects that this custom was a
counsel of divine providence, so that the religion of the true God might not be
profaned by trafficking with gentiles. In this opinion Lactantius is followed by
Peter van der Kuhn in his De republica hebraeorum. It is all confirmed by pub-
lic confession of the Hebrews themselves, who, in expiation of the Septuagint,
held a solemn fast each year on the eighth day of Tebet, which is our Decem-
ber; because when it was finished there were three days of darkness over all
the world, according to the rabbinical books referred to by Casaubon (Exercha-
t tones in Baronium), Buxtorf (Synagoga iudaica) and Hottinger (Thesaurus
philohgicus). And because the Grecizing Jews called Hellenists, among them
Aristeas, who is said to have been in charge of it, claimed divine authority for
this translation, the Jews of Jerusalem mortally hated them.
95 But by the nature of these civil things [it is to be considered impos-
sible] that over confines [such as those] whose trespass was forbidden even by
the highly civilized Egyptians (who were so inhospitable to the Greeks that
even a long time after they had opened Egypt to them it was forbidden to use
a Greek pot, spit, or knife, or even [to eat] meat cut by a Greek knife), over
harsh and forbidding paths, without any language in common, and among
the Hebrews of whom it was proverbially said by the gentiles that they would
not so much as point out a fountain to a thirsty foreigner, the prophets should
have profaned their sacred doctrine by making it accessible to foreigners, new
men unknown to them; for in all nations of the world the priests kept such
doctrine secret even from their own plebs, whence indeed it was everywhere
called "sacred 5 * doctrine, for sacred is as much as to say "secret." And from this
there emerges a most luminous proof of the truth of the Christian religion: that
Pythagoras and Plato, by grace of a most sublime human science, had exalted
themselves to some extent to the knowledge of the divine truths which the
Hebrews had been taught by the true God; and on the other hand there arises
a weighty confutation of the errors of recent mythologists, who believe that
the fables are sacred stories corrupted by the gentile nations and especially by
the Greeks. And although the Egyptians had dealings with the Hebrews in
their captivity, yet, by a custom common to primitive peoples, as we shall show
later, namely that of holding the conquered to be men without gods, they
rather mocked than heeded the Hebrew religion and history. Often, as the
sacred book of Genesis narrates, they scornfully asked the Hebrews why the
God they adored did not come to liberate them from their hands.
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 45
XXXV
[Servius Tullius king. Year of the world 3468, of Rome 225,]
96 By a common error it has hitherto been believed that this king set
up the census in Rome as a basis of popular liberty, whereas we shall see [619 ff.]
that the census was a basis of patrician liberty. And this error is in accord with
that other one according to which it has been believed up to now that, in those
times in which the sick debtor had to appear on an ass or in a cart before the
praetor, Tarquinius Priscus ordained the insignia, togas, devices, and chairs of
ivory (made of the tusks of elephants, which, because the Romans had first seen
them in Lucania in the war with Pyrrhus, they called "Lucanian oxen") and
finally the triumphal golden chariot, in which splendid equipage the Roman
majesty shone brightest in the times of the popular commonwealth.
XXXVI
[Hesiod. Year of the world 3500.]
97 By the proofs we shall advance concerning the time when vulgar
writing was introduced among the Greeks, we put Hesiod about the time of
Herodotus or a little before. The chronologists with too much boldness put
him thirty years before Homer, on whose period the authorities vary by as
much as 460 years. Besides, Porphyry (according to Suidas) and Velleius Pater-
culus state that Homer preceded Hesiod by a great length of time. As for the
tripod that Hesiod consecrated to Apollo on Helicon, with the inscription that
he had surpassed Homer in song, although Varro accepts it (according to Aulus
Gellius), it is to be kept in the museum of imposture, for it is a hoax similar
to those perpetrated in our day by the falsifiers of medals who seek by such
deceit to reap a rich profit.
XXXVII
[Herodotus, Hippocrates. Year of the world 3500.]
98 Hippocrates is placed by the chronologists in the time of the Seven
Sages of Greece. But, partly because his life is too much tinged with fable (he
is said to be the son of Aesculapius and grandson of Apollo), and partly be-
cause he is known to be the author of works written in prose with vulgar char-
acters, he is here placed near the time of Herodotus, who likewise wrote prose
with vulgar characters and wove his history almost entirely out of fables.
XXXVIII
[Idanthyrsus king of Scythia. Year of the world 3530.]
99 This king answered Darius the Great, who had threatened to make
war on him, with five real words (which, as we shall later show, the first peo-
ples must have used before they came to vocal words and finally to written ones).
These real words were a frog, a mouse, a bird, a ploughshare, and a bow for
shooting arrows. Further on we shall show the natural and proper meaning of
46 THE NEW SCIENCE
these objects. It would be tedious to report what St. Cyril of Alexandria re-
lates of the council that Darius held to discuss the meaning of this reply, for
the interpretations his counselors put upon it are obviously ridiculous. And this
Idanthyrsus was the king of those Scythians who surpassed the Egyptians in
point of antiquity, and yet at that late epoch did not even know how to write
with hieroglyphs! Idanthyrsus must have been like one of the Chinese kings
who, up to a few centuries ago cut off from the rest of the world, vainly boast an
antiquity greater than that of the world, and, after so long a time, are still found
writing with hieroglyphs, and, although on account of the great mildness of the
climate they have most refined talents and make so many marvelously delicate
things, do not yet know how to make shadows in painting, against which high-
lights can stand out; whence, since it has neither relief nor depth, their paint-
ing is most crude. And as for the statuettes of porcelain which come from
there, they show the Chinese to be just as unskilled as the Egyptians were in cast-
ing; whence it may be inferred that the Egyptians were as unskilled in painting
as the Chinese are now.
100 To these Scythians belongs Anacharsis, author of the Scythian
oracles, as Zoroaster was of the Chaldean. They must first have been oracles of
soothsayers, which later, by the vanity of the learned, were turned into oracles
of philosophers. From the Hyperboreans of Scythia (either this one or another
born anciently within Greece itself) there came to Greece the two most famous
oracles of the gentiles, the Delphic and the Dodonian; so Herodotus believed,
and after him Pindar and Pherenicus, who are followed by Cicero in his On
the Nature of the Gods. This may explain why Anacharsis was proclaimed a
famous author of oracles and numbered among the most ancient soothsaying
gods, as we shall see in the [section on] Poetic Geography. Meanwhile, to show
how learned Scythia was in esoteric wisdom, let it suffice that the Scythians
would stick a knife in the ground and adore it as a god, in order to justify the
killings they were about to perform. From this wild religion emerged all the
civil and moral virtues narrated by Diodorus Siculus, Justin, Pliny, and lauded
to the skies by Horace. Thence Abaris [i.e. Anacharsis], wishing to order
Scythia by the laws of Greece, was killed by Caduidas his brother. Such was his
profit from the 'barbarian philosophy* of van Heurn that he did not discern by
himself the laws needed to bring a barbarian people to a humane civilization,
but had to learn them from the Greeks! For the very same thing is true of the
Greeks in relation to the Scythians which we have said of them a while ago
[90] in relation to the Egyptians: that by their vanity in giving to their knowl-
edge high-sounding origins of foreign antiquity, they truly deserved the reproof
they represented the Egyptian priest as giving to Solon (as related by Critias in
the first or second Alcibiades of Plato): namely that the Greeks had always
been children. And so it must be said that by this vanity the Greeks, in rela-
tion both to the Scythians and to the Egyptians, lost as much in real merit as
they gained in vain glory.
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 47
XXXIX
[Peloponnesian war. Thucydides, who writes that up to his father's day the Greeks knew
nothing of their own antiquities, therefore set himself to write of this war. Year of the world
3530.]
101 Thucydides was a young man at the time when Herodotus, who
might have been his father, was already old. He lived in the most glorious age
of Greece, which was that of the Peloponnesian war, and since he was a con-
temporary of this struggle he wrote its history in order to write of true things.
By him it was said that down to his father's time, which was also that of
Herodotus, the Greeks knew nothing of their own antiquities. What then
can we think of the things they wrote of the barbarians? And we know of
ancient barbarian history only what they tell us. And what must we think o
the antiquities of the Romans, up to the time of the Carthaginian wars, in view
of the fact that until then they had been concerned only with agriculture and
military affairs, when Thucydides establishes this truth about his own Greeks,
who so promptly came forth as philosophers? Unless, perhaps, we are willing
to say that the Romans had had some particular privilege from God.
XL
[Socrates originates rational moral philosophy. Plato flourishes in metaphysics. Athens is re-
splendent with all the arts of the most cultivated humanity. Law of the Twelve Tables. Year of
the world 3553, of Rome 303.]
102 At this time there is brought from Athens to Rome the Law of the
Twelve Tables, just as crude, inhuman, cruel, uncivilized and monstrous as it
is shown to be in our Principles of Universal Law.
XLI
[Xenophon, carrying the Greek arms into the heart of Persia, is the first to learn of Persian
things with any certainty. Year of the world 3583, of Rome 333.]
103 Thus St. Jerome observes in his Commentary on Daniel. Just as
the Greeks had begun under Psammeticus to learn something of Egypt by
way of commerce (so that Herodotus's more reliable information about the
Egyptians begins with that period), so now, starting from Xenophon, they be-
gan through the exigencies of war to learn more reliable things about the
Persians. Even Aristotle, who accompanied Alexander the Great into Persia,
writes that before that time the Greeks had but told fables about them, as we
have indicated in this Chronological Table. In this way the Greeks began to
have some real knowledge of the affairs of other peoples.
XLII
[Publilian Law. Year of the world 3658, of Rome 416.]
104 This law was put into effect in the 41 6th year of Rome, and con-
tains a most important point of Roman history, for by this Uw the Roman com-
monwealth declared its change from an aristocratic to a popular form of gov-
ernment; whence Publilius Philo, who was its author, was called the "people's
48 THE NEW SCIENCE
dictator." This has not been noticed because the language of the law has not
been properly understood. We shall later make evident that this was the fact.
Here it will suffice to give a hypothetical idea of it.
105 This law and the subsequent Petelian Law, which is of equal im-
portance, remained unknown because of these three words which are not de-
fined: "people," "kingdom," and "liberty." Because of these words it has been
commonly but erroneously believed that the Roman people from the time of
Romulus had been composed of citizens both noble and plebeian, that the Ro-
man kingdom had been monarchical, and that the liberty set up by Brutus had
been a popular liberty. And these three words, not properly defined, have led
into error all the critics, historians, political theorists and jurists, because from
none of these words could they get a clear idea of the heroic commonwealths,
which were of a most severely aristocratic form and therefore entirely different
from those of our time.
1 06 In an asylum opened in the forest, Romulus founded Rome on the
clicntships or protectorships under which the fathers of families maintained as
day laborers in the fields those who had fled to this asylum. These fugitives
had no privilege of citizenship and thus no share of civil liberty. Since they
had taken refuge with the fathers to save their lives, the fathers protected their
natural liberty by setting them separately to the cultivation of their several fields.
The public domain of the Roman territory must have been made up of these
fields, just as Romulus constituted the senate from the fathers themselves.
107 Later, Servius Tullius granted the workers bonitary ownership of
the fields that were the property of the fathers and imposed the census [tax]
upon them. They were to do their own cultivating under the burden of the
census, and with the obligation of serving the fathers in war at their own ex-
pense; as in fact the plebeians did serve the patricians under what has hitherto
been mistaken for popular liberty. This law of Servius Tullius was the first
agrarian law of the world, and it set up the census as the basis of the heroic com-
monwealths, that is to say of the most ancient aristocracies of all the nations.
108 Subsequently, Junius Brutus, casting out the Tarquin tyrants, re-
stored the Roman commonwealth to its original form, and, by setting up the
consuls, as it were an annual pair of aristocratic kings (as Cicero calls them in
his Laws) in place of one king for life, reestablished the liberty of the patricians
as against their tyrants, but not indeed the liberty of the people from the
patricians. But, since the nobles did not keep faith with the plebeians under
the agrarian law o Servius Tullius, the plebs brought about the creation of the
plebeian tribunes and had them accepted under oath by the nobility. The
tribunes were to protect for the people that degree of natural liberty represented
by bonitary ownership of the fields. Thus, when the plebeians were wanting to
secure civil ownership from the nobles, the plebeian tribunes drove from Rome
Marcius Coriolanus because he had said that the plebeians should go and till the
soil; that is, since they were not content with the agrarian law of Servius but
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 49
wanted a fuller and stronger one, they should be reduced again to the day
laborers they had been under Romulus. For if this be not a true picture of
things, how [can we explain] the foolish pride of the plebs in disdaining agri-
culture, since we know that even the patricians deemed it honorable work?
And would [such] a slight pretext have occasioned such a cruel war? For
Marcius, to avenge his exile, would have brought about the ruin of Rome had
it not been for the piteous tears of his mother and his wife which turned him
aside from his impious enterprise.
109 In consequence of all this, the nobles proceeding to take back the
fields from the plebs after they had cultivated them, and the latter having no
civil action for laying claim to them, the plebeian tribunes now appealed to a
Law of the Twelve Tables (by which, as is demonstrated in the Principles of
Universal Law, no other affair but this was settled). By this law the nobles con-
ceded to the plebs the quiritary ownership of the fields. This civil ownership
is permitted to foreigners by the natural law of nations. And this was the
second agrarian law of the ancient nations.
no Now when the plebeians saw [on the one hand] that they could not
transmit the fields intestate to their kin, because they had no sui heredes, agnates
or gentiles (to which relations legitimate succession was then confined), since
their marriages were not solemnized; and [on the other hand] that they could
not even dispose of their fields by testament because they did not have the
rights of citizens; they demanded for themselves the connubium of the nobles,
that is the right to solemnized marriages (for such is the meaning of con-
nubium). The most solemn part of the marriage service was the auspices,
which were the property of the nobles. (These auspices indeed were the great
source of all Roman law, private and public.) And thus the right of contracting
marriages was communicated to the plebeians by the fathers. Since marriage is,
by the definition of the jurisconsult Modestinus, "the sharing of every divine
and human right" (omnis divini et humani iuris communicatio) , and since
citizenship itself is naught else, the fathers thereby gave the plebeians the rights
of citizenship. Then, in the [natural] course of human desires, the plebeians
secured from the fathers the communication of all those rights of private law
which depended upon the auspices: as f atria potestas, sui heredes t agnation and
clan membership, and, in consequence of these rights, the further rights of
legitimate succession, the making of testaments and guardianship. Then they
claimed those dependent rights of public law, securing the communication first
of the imperium by the opening to them of the consulship, and finally of the
science of the laws, by the opening to them of priesthood and pontificate,
in In this way the tribunes of the plebs, by pursuing the function for
which they were created, that of protecting the natural liberty of the plebeians,
were gradually led to secure for them the whole range of _ivil liberty as well.
And the census ordered by Servius Tullius with the subsequent provision that
payment should no longer be made to the nobles privately but to the public
50 THE NEW SCIENCE
treasury so that the treasury might supply to the plebeians the expenses of war
developed naturally from a basis of liberty for the lords into a basis of popular
liberty. Further on we shall see the way in which this came about.
112 By a parallel development, these same tribunes progressed in the
power of making laws. For the Horatian and Hortensian laws could not grant
to the plebs that their plebiscites should be binding upon all the people except in
two special emergencies. In the first of these the plebs had retired to the Aven-
tine in the 304th year of Rome, at which time, as we state here by way of hy-
pothesis and shall later show as a fact, the plebeians were not yet citizens. In
the second they retired to the Janiculum in the 3 67th year of Rome, at which
time the plebs were still struggling with the nobility for the sharing of the
consulate. But on the basis of the two aforesaid laws, the plebs finally reached
the point where they could make universal laws [binding on the nobles as well
as on themselves]. To bring this about required factional movements and re-
volts at Rome, with the result that it was necessary to make Publilius Philo
dictator, an office never created save in times of greatest danger to the com-
monwealth, such as this was. For it had fallen into such great disorder as to
nourish within itself two supreme legislative powers without any distinction of
time, scope or territory, with the result that the commonwealth was on the
point of collapse. Wherefore Philo, to cure the ills of the state, ordained that
whatever the plebs commanded by plebiscites in the assembly by tribes (comitia
tributd) "should be binding on all the Quirites" (omncs quirites teneref), i.e.
should be binding on all the people in the assembly by hundreds (comitia
centuriata) in which "all the Quirites" (omnes quirites) met. (For the Romans
called themselves Quirites only in public assembly, and Quiris in the singular
is never found in common Latin speech.) By this formula Philo meant to signify
that laws could not be enacted contrary to the plebiscites. The plebs had already
been made in all respects equal to the nobles by laws to which the latter had
agreed. By this most recent move, to which the nobles could offer no opposi-
tion without bringing the commonwealth to ruin, the plebs had become supe-
rior to the nobles, for without ratification by the senate the plebs could enact
general laws for all the people. Thus the Roman commonwealth had now
naturally become free and popular. Philo accordingly proclaimed it such by
this law, and hence was called the people's dictator.
113 In conformity" with this change in its nature, he gave the common-
wealth two ordinances, which are contained in the other two sections of the
Publilian Law. In the first this dictator ordained that authorization by the
senate, which had been an authorization by the lords whereby what had first
been decided by the people "the fathers had afterwards to ratify" (deinde patres
fierent auc tores) so that the election of the consuls and the enacting of the
laws, being determined in advance by the people, had been [respectively] pub-
lic testimonials of merit and public demands of right should thenceforth be
given by the fathers to the people, who were now sovereign and free, prior to
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 51
the deliberations of the assembly (in incertum comitiorum eventum), as [if they,
the fathers, were but] the guardians of the people, who were the real lords and
masters of the Roman imperium. The people, if they wished to enact laws,
were to do so according to the formula presented to them by the senate. If not,
they could make use of the ; " sovereign right and "antiquate" the [proposed]
laws; that is, declare they wanted no innovation. Thus everything the senate
should henceforth ordain concerning public affairs should be [regarded as] in-
structions given by it to the people or commissions given to it by the people.
Finally there remained the census, for, since the treasury had hitherto been
the property of the nobles, they alone had been created censors of it. Since,
however, by this law the treasury became the property of the people as a whole,
Philo ordered in the third place that the censorship, the only magistracy in
which the plebs had as yet no share, should also be extended to them.
114 If we read further into the history of Rome in the light of this hypoth-
esis, we shall find by a thousand proofs that it provides a foundation for all
the things therein narrated, which have lacked a common foundation and a
proper and particular connection among themselves because the three aforesaid
words were undefined; wherefore this hypothesis should be accepted as true.
However, if properly considered, this is not so much a hypothesis as a truth
meditated in idea which later will be authoritatively shown to be the fact. And
granted Livy's generalization that the asylums were "an old counsel of
founders of cities" (yctus urbes condentium consilium), as Romulus founded
the city of Rome within the asylum opened in the forest this hypothesis gives
us also the history of all the other cities of the world in times we have so far
despaired of knowing. This then is an instance of an ideal eternal history
(which will later be meditated and discovered) whose course is run in time by
the histories of all nations.
XLIII
[Petelian Law. Year of the world 3661, of Rome 419.]
115 This second law, called "on slavery for debt" (de nexu), was en-
acted in the year of Rome 419 (and thus three years after the Publilian law) by
the consuls Caius Poetelius and Lucius Papirius Mugillanus. It contains another
most important point in [the study of] Roman affairs, for by this law the
plebeians were released from the feudal liability of becoming liege vassals of the
nobles on account of debts, for which the nobles used to compel the plebeians to
work for them, often for life, in their private prisons. But the senate retained the
sovereign power it had over the lands of the Roman imperium, though the
imperium itself had already passed to the people. And under the provisions of
the senatus consultum which was called "the last," the senate kept this power
for itself by force of arms as long as the Roman commonwealth remained free.
Thus whenever the people wanted to dispose of these lands under the agrarian
laws of the Gracchi, the senate armed the consuls, who proscribed as rebels
52 THE NEW SCIENCE
and executed the tribunes of the plebs who had been the authors of these laws.
This great effect could only be brought about by a system of sovereign fiefs
subject to a higher sovereignty. This system is confirmed by a passage in one of
the Catilinarian orations of Cicero where he affirms that Tiberius Gracchus by his
agrarian law was destroying the form of government of the commonwealth, and
had hence been rightfully put to death by Publius Scipio Nasica on the ground
set forth in the formula by which the consul armed the people against the
authors of the aforesaid law: "Whoever is for the safety of the commonwealth,
let him follow the consul" (Oui rempublicam salvam velit consulem sequatur).
XLIV
[War with Tarentum wherein the Latins and the Greeks begin to know each other. Year of
the world 3708, of Rome 489.]
116 The reason for this war was the maltreatment accorded by the
Tarentines to the Roman ships which landed on their coasts, and likewise to
the Roman ambassadors. Their excuse, as phrased by Florus, was that "they did
not know who the Romans were or whence they came" (qui essent aut unde
venirent ignorabani). So well acquainted were the first peoples, even when they
were not separated by water and were not far apart by land !
XLV
[Second Carthaginian war, with which begins the period of Roman history known with some
certainty by Livy, though he professes to be ignorant of three important circumstances. Year of
the world 3849, of Rome 552.]
117 Livy professed to write the history of Rome with more certainty
from the period of the second Carthaginian war, and promised to describe the
most memorable of all wars fought by the Romans. And because of its incom-
parable greatness the chronicles he writes of it should have the greater certainty
that belongs to things of greater fame. Yet he did not know, and openly admits
he did not know, three most important circumstances. The first, in whose con-
sulship Hannibal, after the capture of Saguntum, had started on his march from
Spain to Italy. The second, over which Alps he had come, the Cottian or the
Pennine. And the third, what strength he had with him. On this last matter
there was in the ancient annals such a wide diversity of opinion that some had
written 6,000 cavalry and 20,000 infantry, others 20,000 cavalry and 80,000 in-
fantry.
[Conclusion]
118 It can be seen by our reasoning in these Notes that all that has come
down to us from the ancient gentile nations for the times covered by this Table
is most uncertain. So that in all this we have entered as it were into a no man's
land where the rule of law obtains that "the [first] occupant acquires title"
(occupanti conceduntur) . For this reason we trust that we shall offend no man's
right if we often reason differently and at times in direct opposition to the opin-
ions which have been held up to now concerning the beginnings of the hu-
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 53
manity of the nations. By so doing we shall reduce these beginnings to scientific
principles, by which the facts of certain history may be assigned their first
origins, on which they rest and by which they are reconciled. For up to now
they do not seem to have had any common foundation nor any continuous se-
quence nor any coherence among themselves.
[SECTION II]
ELEMENTS
119 In order to give form to the materials hereinbefore set in order in
the Chronological Table, we now propose the following axioms, both philo-
sophical and philological, including a few reasonable and proper postulates and
some clarified definitions. And just as the blood does in animate bodies, so will
these elements course through our Science and animate it in all its reasonings
about the common nature of nations.
120 Because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is
lost in ignorance, man makes himself the measure of all things.
121 This axiom explains those two common human traits, on the one
hand that rumor grows in its course (jama crcscit eundo)^ on the other that
rumor is deflated by the presence [of the thing itself] (mlnult praesentia
famam). In the long course that rumor has run from the beginning of the world
it has been the perennial source of all the exaggerated opinions which have
hitherto been held concerning remote antiquities unknown to us, by virtue of
that property of the human mind noted by Tacitus in his Life of Agricola, where
he says that everything unknown is taken for something great (omne ignotum
fro magnifico est).
II
122 It is another property of the human mind that whenever men can
form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is
familiar and at hand.
123 This axiom points to the inexhaustible source of all the errors about
the beginnings of humanity that have been adopted by entire nations and by
all the scholars. For when the former began to take notice of them and the
latter to investigate them, it was on the basis of their own enlightened, cultivated
and magnificent times that they judged the origins of humanity, which must
9vertheless by the nature of things have been small, crude and quite obscure,
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 55
124 Under this head are to be recalled two types of conceit we have men-
tioned above, one of the nations and the other of the scholars.
Ill
125 As for the conceit of the nations, we have heard that golden saying
of Diodorus Siculus. Every nation, according to him, whether Greek or bar-
barian, has had the same conceit that it before all other nations invented the
comforts of human life and that its remembered history goes back to the very
beginning of the world.
126 This axiom disposes at once of the proud claims of the Chaldeans,
Scythians, Egyptians, Chinese, to have been the first founders of the humanity
of the ancient world. But Flavius Josephus the Jew purges his nation [of this
vain boast] by that magnanimous confession that we have heard above: namely,
that the Hebrews had lived cut off from all the gentiles. And sacred history
assures us that the world is almost young in contrast to the antiquity with
which it was credited by the Chaldeans, Scythians, Egyptians, and in our own
day by the Chinese. This is a great proof of the truth of sacred history.
IV
127 To this conceit of the nations there may be added that of the scholars,
who will have it that whatever they know is as old as the world.
128 This axiom disposes of all the opinions of the scholars concerning
the matchless wisdom of the ancients. It convicts of fraud the oracles of Zoro-
aster the Chaldean, of Anacharsis the Scythian, which have not come down to
us, the Poimander of Hermes Trismegistus, the Orphics (or verses of Orpheus),
and the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, as all the more discerning critics agree.
It further condemns as impertinent all the mystic meanings with which the
Egyptian hieroglyphs are endowed by the scholars, and the philosophical al-
legories which they have read into the Greek fables.
129 To be useful to the human race, philosophy must raise and direct
weak and fallen man, not rend his nature or abandon him in his corruption.
130 This axiom dismisses from the school of our Science the Stoics who
seek to mortify the senses and the Epicureans who make them the criterion.
For both deny providence, the former chaining themselves to fate, the latter
abandoning themselves to chance. The latter moreover affirm that the human
soul dies with the body. Both should be called monastic or solitary philosophers.
On the other hand [this axiom] admits to our school the political philosophers,
and first of all the Platonists, who agree with all the lawgivers on these three
main points: that there is divine providence, that human passions should be
moderated and made into human virtues, and that the human soul is immortal.
Thus from this axiom are derived the three principles of this Science.
56 THE NEW SCIENCE
VI
131 Philosophy considers man as he should be and so can be of service to
but very few, who wish to live in the Republic of Plato, not to fall back into the
dregs of Romulus.
VII
132 Legislation considers man as he is in order to turn him to good uses
in human society. Out of ferocity, avarice and ambition, the three vices which
run throughout the human race, it creates the military, merchant and govern-
ing classes, and thus the strength, riches and wisdom of commonwealths. Out
of these three great vices, which could certainly destroy all mankind on the face
of the earth, it makes civil happiness.
133 This axiom proves that there is divine providence and further that
it is a divine legislative mind. For out of the passions of men each bent on his
private advantage, for the sake of which they would live like wild beasts in the
wilderness, it has made the civil orders by which they may live in human society.
VIII
134 Things do not settle or endure out of their natural order.
135 In view of the fact that the human race, as far back as memory of
the world goes, has lived and still lives conformably in society, this axiom alone
decides the great dispute still waged by the best philosophers and moral the-
ologians against Carneades the skeptic and Epicurus a dispute to which not
even Grotius could put an end namely, whether law exists by nature, or
whether man is naturally sociable, which comes to the same thing.
136 This same axiom, together with the seventh and its corollary, proves
that man has free choice, however weak, to make virtues of his passions; but
that he is aided by God, naturally by divine providence, and supernaturally by
divine grace.
DC
137 Men who do not know the truth of things try to reach certainty
about them, so that, if they cannot satisfy their intellects by science, their wills
at least may rest on conscience.
x
138 Philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of the
true; philology observes the authority of human choice, whence comes con-
sciousness of the certain.
139 This axiom by its second part defines as philologians all the gram-
marians, historians, critics, who have occupied themselves with the study of the
languages and deeds of peoples: both their domestic affairs, such as customs and
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 57
laws, and their external affairs, such as wars, peaces, alliances, travels and com-
merce.
140 This same axiom shows how the philosophers failed by half in not
giving certainty to their reasonings by appeal to the authority of the philologians,
and likewise how the latter failed by half in not taking care to give their au-
thority the sanction of truth by appeal to the reasoning of the philosophers. If
they had both done this they would have been more useful to their common-
wealths and they would have anticipated us in conceiving this Science.
XI
141 Human choice, by its nature most uncertain, is made certain and de-
termined by the common sense of men with respect to human needs or utilities,
which are the two origins of the natural law of nations.
XII
142 Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire
class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the whole human race.
143 This axiom, with the following definition, will provide a new art
of criticism concerning the founders of nations, who must have preceded by
more than a thousand years the writers with whom criticism has so far been
occupied.
XIII
144 Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each
other must have a common ground of truth.
145 This axiom is a great principle which establishes the common sense
of the human race as the criterion taught to the nations by divine providence to
define what is certain in the natural law of nations. And the nations reach this
certainty by recognizing the underlying agreements which, despite variations
of detail, obtain among them all in respect of this law. Thence issues the mental
dictionary for assigning origins to all the divers articulated languages. By means
of this dictionary is conceived the ideal eternal history which determines the
histories in time of all the nations. The axioms proper to this dictionary and to
this history will shortly be proposed.
146 This same axiom does away with all the ideas hitherto held con-
cerning the natural law of nations, which has been thought to have originated
in one nation and been passed on to others. This error was encouraged by the
bad example of the Egyptians and Greeks in vainly boasting that they had spread
civilization throughout the world. It was this error that gave rise to the fiction
that the Law of the Twelve Tables came to Rome from Greece. If that had been
the case, it would have been a civil law communicated to other peoples by human
provision, and not a law which divine providence ordained naturally in all na-
tions along with human customs themselves. Indeed it will be one of our con-
58 THE NEW SCIENCE
stant labors throughout this book to demonstrate that the natural law of nations
originated separately among the various peoples, each in ignorance of the others,
and that subsequently, as a result of wars, embassies, alliances and commerce,
it came to be recognized as common to the entire human race.
XIV
147 The nature of things is nothing but their coming into being (nasci-
mento) at certain times and in certain fashions. Whenever the time and fashion
is thus and so, such and not otherwise are the things that come into being.
XV
148 The inseparable properties of things must be due to the mode or
fashion in which they are born. By these properties we may therefore tell that
the nature or birth (natura o nasdmento) was thus and not otherwise.
XVI
149 Vulgar traditions must have had public grounds of truth, by virtue
of which they came into being and were preserved by entire peoples over long
periods of time.
150 It will be another great labor of this Science to recover these grounds
of truth truth which, in the passage of years and the changes in languages and
customs, has come down to us enveloped in falsehood.
XVII
151 The vulgar tongues should be the most weighty witnesses concern-
ing those ancient customs of the peoples that were observed at the time when
the languages were being formed.
XVIII
152 A language of an ancient nation, which has maintained itself as the
dominant tongue throughout its development, should be a great witness to the
customs of the early days of the world.
153 This axiom assures us that the weightiest philological proofs of the
natural law of nations (in the understanding of which the Romans were un-
questionably preeminent) can be drawn from Latin speech. For the same reason
scholars of the German language can do the like, since it retains this same prop-
erty possessed by the ancient Roman language.
XIX
154 If the Laws of the Twelve Tables were customs of the peoples of
Latium, originating in the age of Saturn, remaining unwritten elsewhere [in
Latium] but set down by the Romans in bronze and guarded with religious care
by Roman jurisprudence, then this Law is a great witness of the ancient natural
law of the nations of Latium.
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 59
155 That this was true in fact, we showed many years ago in our Prin-
ciples of Universal Law, and the present work will throw further light upon it.
XX
156 If the poems of Homer are civil histories of ancient Greek customs,
they will be two great treasure houses of the natural law of the nations of
Greece.
157 For the present this axiom is merely assumed; later its truth will be
demonstrated.
XXI
158 The Greek philosophers hastened the natural course which their na-
tion was to undergo, for when they appeared the Greeks were still in a crude
state of barbarism, from which they advanced immediately to one of the highest
refinement while at the same time preserving intact their fables both of gods
and of heroes. The Romans, on the other hand, proceeding at an even pace in
[the development of] their customs, quite lost sight of the history of their gods
(whence the age of the gods, as the Egyptians named it, is called by Varro the
obscure period of the Romans), but preserved in vulgar speech their heroic his-
tory, which extends from the time of Romulus to the Publilian and Petelian laws,
and which will be found to be a continuous historic mythology of the Greek
age of the heroes.
159 [That] this [is the] nature of human civil affairs is confirmed by
the example of the French nation. For in the midst of the barbarism of the
twelfth century there was opened the famous Parisian school where Peter
Lombard, the celebrated master of the Sentences, began to lecture on the subtlest
scholastic theology. And like a Homeric poem there still lived on the history of
Bishop Turpin of Paris, full of all those fables of the heroes of France called
paladins which were later to fill so many romances and poems. And because of
this premature passage from barbarism to the subtlest sciences, French remained
a language of the greatest refinement. So much so indeed that of all living lan-
guages it seems most to have restored to our times the atticism of the Greeks,
and it is the best of all languages for scientific reasoning, as the Greek was. Yet
French preserves, as Greek did, many diphthongs, which are natural to a bar-
barous tongue still stiff and inept at combining consonants with vowels. In
confirmation of what we have said of both these languages, we may here add
an observation in regard to young people at an age when memory is tenacious,
imagination vivid, and wit nimble. At this age they may profitably occupy them-
selves with languages and plane geometry, without thereby subduing that
acerbity of minds still bound to the body which may be called the barbarism of
the intellect. But if they pass on while yet in this immature stage to the highly
subtle studies of metaphysical criticism or algebra, they become overfine for life
in their way of thinking and are rendered incapable of any great work.
60 THE NEW SCIENCE
160 But as we further meditated this work we came upon another cause
for the effect in question, and this cause is perhaps more apposite. Romulus
founded Rome in the midst of the other more ancient cities of Latium, and
founded it by opening there the asylum which Livy defines generally as "an old
counsel of founders of cities" (yetus urbes condentium consilium)\ for since
violence still reigned he naturally established the city of Rome on the same basis
on which the oldest cities of the world had been founded. And so it came about,
since Roman customs were developing from such beginnings at a time when the
vulgar tongues of Latium were already well advanced, that Roman civil affairs,
the like of which the Greeks had set forth in heroic speech, were set forth by the
Romans in vulgar speech. Thus ancient Roman history will be found to be a
continuous mythology of the heroic history of the Greeks. And this must be the
reason why the Romans were the heroes of the world. For Rome subdued the
other cities of Latium, then Italy and finally the whole world, because heroism
was still young among the Romans, whereas among the other peoples of Latium,
from whose conquest all the greatness of Rome sprang, it must already have
begun to decay.
XXII
161 There must in the nature of human things be a mental language
common to all nations, which uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible
in human social life, and expresses it with as many diverse modifications as
these same things may have diverse aspects. A proof of this is afforded by proverbs
or maxims of vulgar wisdom, in which substantially the same meanings find as
many diverse expressions as there are nations ancient and modern.
162 This common mental language is proper to our Science, by whose
light linguistic scholars will be enabled to construct a mental vocabulary com-
mon to all the various articulate languages living and dead. We gave a particular
example of this in the first edition of the New Science. There we proved that
the names of the first family fathers, in a great number of living and dead lan-
guages, were given them because of the various properties which they had in
the state of the families and of the first commonwealths, at the time when
the nations were forming their languages. As far as our small erudition will
permit, we shall make use of this vocabulary in all the matters we discuss.
163 Of all the aforesaid propositions, the first, second, third and fourth
give us the basis for refuting all opinions hitherto held about the beginnings of
humanity. The refutations turn on the improbabilities, absurdities, contradic-
tions and impossibilities of these opinions. The subsequent propositions, from
the fifth to the fifteenth, which give us the basis of truth, will serve for consider-
ing this world of nations in its eternal idea, by that property of every science,
noted by Aristotle, that "science has to do with what is universal and eternal"
(scientia debet esse de universalibus et aeternis). The last propositions, from the
fifteenth to the twenty-second, will give us the basis of certitude. By their use
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 61
we shall be able to sec in fact this world of nations which we have studied in
idea, following the method of philosophizing made most certain by Francis
Bacon, Lord of Verulam, but carrying it over from the things of nature, on
which he composed his book Cogitata [et] visa, to the civil affairs of mankind.
164 The propositions set forth above arc general and are the basis of our
Science throughout; those which follow are particular and provide more spe-
cific bases for the various matters it treats of.
XXIII
165 Sacred history is more ancient than all the most ancient profane
histories that have come down to us, for it narrates in great detail and over
a period of more than eight hundred years the state of nature under the
patriarchs; that is, the state of the families, out of which, by general agreement
of political theorists, the peoples and cities later arose. Of this family state pro-
fane history has told us nothing or little, and that little quite confused.
166 This axiom proves the truth of sacred history as against the na-
tional conceit pointed out to us by Diodorus Siculus, for the Hebrews have pre-
served their memories in full detail from the very beginning of the world.
xxrv
167 The Hebrew religion was founded by the true God on the prohibi-
tion of the divination on which all the gentile nations arose.
168 This axiom is one of the principal reasons for the division of the
entire world of the ancient nations into Hebrews and gentiles.
XXV
169 That the flood was worldwide is proved not indeed by the philo-
logical evidence of Martin Schoock, for it is far too slight, nor by the astrological
evidence of Cardinal Pierre D'Ailly, followed by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
For this latter evidence is too uncertain, indeed quite false, relying as it does on
the Alphonsine Tables t which were refuted by the Jews and are now refuted by
the Christians, who, having rejected the calculations of Eusebius and Bede, now
follow those of Philo the Jew. But our demonstration will be drawn from
physical histories discerned in the fables, as will be seen from the following
axioms.
XXVI
170 The giants were by nature of enormous build, like those monstrous
and fierce creatures which travelers claim to have seen at the foot of America,
in the country of the so-called "Patagones" [ = Big Feet]. And, putting aside
the vain, abortive and false reasons adduced for these creatures by the philos-
ophers, as collected and followed by Chassagnon in his De gigantibus, we shall
adduce the causes, partly physical and partly moral, observed by Julius Caesar
and Cornelius Tacitus in speaking of the gigantic stature of the ancient Ger-
62 THE NEW SCIENCE
mans. In our view, these causes are to be traced to the savage education of
their children.
XXVII
171 Greek history, from which we get all we know about the history
of all other ancient gentile nations except the Roman, starts with the flood and
the giants.
172 These two axioms make it evident that the entire original human
race was divided into two species: the one of giants, the other of men of normal
stature; the former gentiles, the latter Hebrews. Also that this difference can
only have come about as the result of the savage education of the former and
the human education of the latter. Hence that the Hebrews had a different
origin from that of the gentiles.
XXVIII
173 Two great remnants of Egyptian antiquity have come down to us,
as we have noted above [53]. One of them is the fact that the Egyptians re-
duced all preceding world time to three ages, namely, the age of the gods, the
age of the heroes, and the age of men. The other is that during these three ages
three languages had been spoken, corresponding in order to the three aforesaid
ages; namely, the hieroglyphic or sacred language, the symbolic or figurative
(which is the heroic) language, and the epistolary or vulgar language of men
employing conventional signs for communicating the common needs of their
life.
XXIX
174 Homer, in five passages from his two poems to be cited later, men-
tions a language more ancient than his own (which was certainly a heroic lan-
guage) and calls it "the language of the gods."
XXX
175 Varro had the diligence to assemble thirty thousand names of gods
for the Greeks counted that many. These were related to as many needs of
physical, moral, economic or civil life of the earliest times.
176 These three axioms establish the fact that the world of peoples be-
gan everywhere with religion. This will be the first of the three principles of
this science.
XXXI
177 Wherever a people has grown savage in arms so that human laws
have no longer any place among it, the only powerful means of reducing it is
religion.
178 This axiom establishes the fact that divine providence initiated the
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 63
process by which the fierce and violent were brought from their outlaw state
to humanity and entered upon national life. It did so by awaking in them a con-
fused idea of divinity, which they in their ignorance attributed to that to which
it did not belong. Thus through the terror of this imagined divinity, they be-
gan to put themselves in some order.
179 Such an [initiating] principle of things Thomas Hobbes failed to
see among his own "fierce and violent men,*' because he went afield in search of
principles and fell into error with the "chance" of his Epicurus. He thought to
enrich Greek philosophy by adding a great part which it certainly had lacked
(as George Pasch observes in his DC eruditis huius saeculi inventis): the study
of man in the whole society of the human race. But the result was as unhappy as
the effort was noble. Nor would Hobbes have conceived this project if the
Christian religion had not given him the inspiration for it. For it demands of
all mankind not merely justice but charity. From this point begins the refuta-
tion of the false dictum of Polybius that if the world had philosophers there
would be no need of religions. For if there were in the world no common-
wealths, which cannot arise without religions, it would have no philosophers.
XXXII
180 When men are ignorant of the natural causes producing things, and
cannot even explain them by analogy with similar things, they attribute their
own nature to them. The vulgar, for example, say the magnet loves the iron.
181 This axiom is embraced by the first: namely, that the human mind,
because of its indefinite nature, wherever it is lost in ignorance makes itself the
rule of the universe in respect of everything it does not know.
XXXIII
182 The physics of the ignorant is a vulgar metaphysics by which they
refer the causes of the things they do not know to the will of God without con-
sidering the means by which the divine will operates.
XXXIV
183 That is a true property of the human mind which Tacitus points
out where he says "minds once cowed are prone to superstition" (mobiles ad
superstitioncm perculsac semel mentes). Once men are seized by a frightful
superstition, they refer to it all they imagine, see, or even do.
XXXV
184 Wonder is the daughter of ignorance; and the greater the object
of wonder, the more the wonder grows.
XXXVI
185 Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak.
64 THE NEW SCIENCE
XXXVII
186 The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to
insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things
in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons.
187 This philologico-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world's
childhood men were by nature sublime poets.
XXXVIII
1 88 That is a golden passage in Lactantius Firmianus where he con-
siders the origins of idolatry, saying: "Rude men at first called [them, i.e. the
king and his family] gods either for their wonderful excellence (wonderful it
seemed to men still rude and simple), or, as commonly happens, in admiration
of present power, or on account of the benefits by which they had been con-
ducted to civilization."
XXXIX
189 Curiosity that inborn property of man, daughter of ignorance and
mother of knowledge when wonder wakens our minds, has the habit,
wherever it sees some extraordinary phenomenon of nature, a comet for ex-
ample, a sun-dog, or a midday star, of asking straightway what it means.
XL
190 Witches, who are full of frightful superstitions, are also exceedingly
savage and cruel. Indeed, if it is necessary for the solemnizing of their witch-
craft, they do not shrink from killing and dismembering tender innocent chil-
dren.
191 All these propositions from the twenty-eighth to the thirty-eighth
reveal to us the beginnings of divine poetry or poetic theology. From the
thirty-first on they give us the beginnings of idolatry; from the thirty-ninth, the
beginnings of divination; and the fortieth finally gives us the beginnings of
sacrifice in connection with bloodthirsty religions. These sacrifices began among
the first crude savage men with votive offerings and human victims. The latter,
as we learn from Plautus, were by the Latins vulgarly called "Saturn's victims"
(Batumi hostiae). They were the sacrifices to Moloch among the Phoenicians,
who passed through fire the children consecrated to that false divinity. Some of
these consecrations were preserved in the Law of the Twelve Tables. These
things give the right sense to that saying, "Fear first created gods in the world"
(Primos in orbe dcos fecit timor) : false religions were born not of imposture
but of credulity. Likewise the unhappy vow and sacrifice that Agamemnon made
of his pious daughter Iphigenia, at which Lucretius impiously exclaims, "So
great were the 4vils religion could prompt" (Tantum religio potuit suadere
malorum), derive from the counsel of divine providence. For all this was neces-
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 65
sary to tame the sons of the cyclopes and reduce them to the humanity of an
Aristides, a Socrates, a Laelius and a Scipio Africanus.
XLI
192 We postulate, and the postulate is reasonable, that for several hun-
dred years the earth, soaked by the water of the universal flood, sent forth no
dry exhalations or matter capable of igniting in the air to produce lightning.
XLII
193 Jove hurls his bolts and fells the giants, and every gentile nation
had its Jove.
194 This axiom contains the physical history that the fables have pre-
served for us: that the universal deluge covered the whole earth.
195 This same axiom with its preceding postulate should make it clear
to us that for a long period of time the impious races of the three children of
Noah had wandered in a wild state, and in their feral wandering had become
scattered and dispersed through the great forest of the earth, and that with
their wild education giants had sprung up and existed among them at the
time when the heavens thundered for the first time after the flood.
XLIII
196 Every gentile nation had its Hercules, who was the son of Jove; and
Varro, the most learned of antiquarians, numbered as many as forty of them.
197 This axiom marks the beginning of heroism among the first peo-
ples, which was born of the false opinion that the heroes were of divine origin.
198 This same axiom and the preceding one, giving us so many Joves
and then so many Herculeses among the gentile nations, together show us that
these nations could not have been founded without religion and could not
grow without courage. Moreover, since in their beginnings these nations were
forest-bred and shut off from any knowledge of each other, and since by axiom
xiii "uniform ideas, born among peoples unknown to each other, must have a
common ground of truth," these axioms give us this great principle as well:
that the first fables must have contained civil truths, and must therefore have
been the histories of the first peoples.
XLIV
199 The first sages of the Greek world were the theological poets, who
certainly flourished before the heroic poets, just as Jove was the father of
Hercules.
200 This and the two preceding axioms establish the fact that all the
gentile nations, inasmuch as they all had their Joves and their Herculeses, were
poetic in their beginnings; and that divine poetry was born first among them,
and later heroic poetry.
66 THE NEW SCIENCE
XLV
201 Men are naturally impelled to preserve the memories of the laws
and orders that bind them in their societies.
XLVJE
202 All barbarian histories have fabulous beginnings.
203 All these axioms from the forty-second on give us the beginning of
our historical mythology.
XLVII
204 The human mind is naturally impelled to take delight in uniformity.
205 This axiom, as applied to the fables, is confirmed by the habit the
vulgar have when making up fables of men famous for this or that, in these
or those circumstances, of making the fable fit the character and occasion.
These fables are ideal truths conforming to the merits of those of whom the vul-
gar tell them; and such falseness in fact as they now and then contain consists
simply in failure to give their subjects their due. So that, if we consider the
matter well, poetic truth is metaphysical truth, and physical truth which is not
in conformity with it should be considered false. Thence springs this important
consideration in poetic theory: the true war chief, for example, is the Godfrey
that Torquato Tasso imagines; and all the chiefs who do not conform throughout
to Godfrey are not true chiefs of war.
XLVIII
206 The nature of children is such that by the ideas and names associated
with the first men, women and things they have known, they afterwards appre-
hend and name all the men, women and things which have any resemblance
or relation to the first.
XLIX
207 A truly golden passage is that above cited from lamblichus On the
Mysteries of the Egyptians to the effect that the Egyptians attributed to Hermes
Trismegistus all discoveries useful or necessary to human life.
208 This statement, supported by the preceding axiom, will turn back
to this divine philosopher all the senses of sublime natural theology that he him-
self attributed to the mysteries of the Egyptians.
209 These three axioms [XLVH-XLIX] give us the origin of the poetic char-
acters that constitute the essence of the fables. The first of the three shows the nat-
ural inclination of the vulgar to invent them, and to invent them appropriately.
The second shows that the first men, the children as it were of the human race,
not being able to form intelligible class-concepts of things, had a natural need to
create poetic characters, that is, imaginative class-concepts or univcrsals, by reduc-
ing to them as to certain models or ideal portraits all the particular species which
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 67
resembled them. Because of the resemblance, the ancient fables could not but
be created appropriately. Just so the Egyptians reduced to the genus "civil sage"
all their inventions useful or necessary to the human race which are particular
effects of civil wisdom, and because they could not abstract the intelligible genus
"civil sage/' much less the form of the civil wisdom in which these Egyptians
were sages, they imaged it forth as Hermes Trismegistus. So far were the
Egyptians, at the time when they were enriching the world with discoveries
useful or necessary to the human race, from being philosophers and understand-
ing universals or intelligible class-concepts!
210 This last axiom, following on those preceding, is the principle of
the true poetic allegories which gave the fables univocal rather than analogous
meanings for various particulars comprised under their poetic genera. They
were therefore called diver silo quid, that is, expressions comprising in one gen-
eral concept various species of men, deeds, or things.
L
211 In children memory is most vigorous, and imagination is therefore
excessively vivid, for imagination is nothing but extended or compounded
memory.
212 This axiom is the explanation of the vividness of the poetic images
the world had to form in its first childhood.
LI
213 In every pursuit men without natural aptitude succeed by obstinate
study of technique, but in poetry he who lacks native ability cannot succeed
by technique.
214 This axiom shows that, since poetry founded gentile humanity, from
which alone the arts were to spring, the first poets were such by nature.
LII
215 Children excel in imitation; we observe them generally amuse them-
selves by imitating what they are able to understand.
216 This axiom shows that the world in its infancy was composed of
poetic nations, for poetry is nothing but imitation.
217 This axiom will explain the fact that all the arts of things necessary,
useful, convenient, and even in large part those of human pleasure, were in-
vented in the poetic centuries before the philosophers came; for the arts are
nothing but imitations of nature, poems in a certain way made of things.
LIII
21 8 Men at first feel without observing, then they observe with a troubled
and agitated spirit, finally they reflect with a clear mind.
219 This axiom is the principle of the poetic sentences, which are formed
68 THE NEW SCIENCE
with senses of passions and affections, in contrast with philosophic sentences,
which are formed by reflection and reasoning. The more the latter rise toward
universals, the closer they approach the truth; the more the former take hold
of particulars, the more certain they become.
LIV
220 Whatever appertains to men but is doubtful or obscure, they nat-
urally interpret according to their own natures and the passions and habits
springing from them.
221 This axiom is a great canon of our mythology. According to it the
fables originating among the first savage and crude men were very severe, as
befitted the founding of nations emerging from a state of fierce bestial freedom.
Then, with the long passage of years and change of customs, they were impro-
priated, altered and obscured in the dissolute and corrupt times even before
Homer. Because religion was important to the men of Greece, and they feared
to have the gods opposed to their desires as they were to their customs, they
attributed their customs to the gods and gave improper, ugly and obscene
meanings to the fables.
LV
222 That is a golden passage of Eusebius (from his account of the wis-
dom of the Egyptians as exalted above that of all other gentiles) in which he
says: "The first theology of the Egyptians was simply a history interspersed with
fables, to which later generations, growing ashamed of them, gradually at-
tached mystical interpretations." That is what was done, for instance, by
Manethos, or Manetho, the high priest of the Egyptians, when he translated
all Egyptian history into a sublime natural theology, as has been said above [46].
223 These two axioms are two great proofs of our historic mythology,
and they are at the same time two great whirlwinds to confound any notion
of the matchless wisdom of the ancients, and two great foundations of the
truth of the Christian religion, whose sacred history narrates nothing to be
ashamed of.
LVI
224 The first authors among the Easterners, Egyptians, Greeks and
Latins, and, in the second barbarism, the first writers in the modern languages
of Europe, were poets.
LVII
225 Mutes make themselves understood by gestures or objects that have
natural relations with the ideas they wish to signify.
226 This axiom is the principle of the hieroglyphs by which all nations
spoke in the time of their first barbarism.
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 69
227 It is also the principle of the natural speech which Plato (in the
Cratylus) and after him lamblichus {On the Mysteries of the Egyptians) guessed
to have been spoken in the world at one time. Their view was shared by the
Stoics and by Origen (Against Celsus)', but, since it was but a guess, -it was
opposed by Aristotle (in his On Interpretation) and by Galen (in his Doctrines
of Hippoctates and Plato). The dispute is discussed by Publius Nigidius in Aulus
Gellius. This natural speech must have been succeeded by the poetic discourse
of images, similes, comparisons and natural properties.
LVIII
228 Mutes utter formless sounds by singing, and stammerers by sing-
ing teach their tongues to pronounce.
LIX
229 Men vent great passions by breaking into song, as we observe in the
most grief-stricken and the most joyful.
230 These two axioms supposing that the founders of the gentile na-
tions had wandered about in the wild state of dumb beasts and that, being
therefore sluggish, they were inexpressive save under the impulse of violent
passions [lead to the conjecture that] their first languages must have been
formed in singing.
LX
231 Languages must have begun with monosyllables, for [even] in the
present abundance of articulated [i.e. polysyllabic] words into which children
are now born they begin with monosyllables in spite of the fact that in them
the fibers of the organ necessary to articulate speech are very flexible.
LXI
232 Heroic verse is the oldest of all, and spondaic the slowest; and far-
ther on we shall see that heroic verse was originally spondaic.
LXII
233 Iambic verse is the closest to prose, and the iamb is a "swift foot,"
as Horace puts it.
234 These last two axioms lead us to conjecture that ideas and language
developed at equal pace.
235 All these axioms from the forty-seventh on, together with those
previously set forth as principles for all the rest [I-XXH], cover the divisions of
poetic theory: namely, fable [or plot], custom [or character] and its appropriate-
ness, sentence [or thought], style [or diction] and its clarity, allegory, song and
finally verse. The last seven axioms [LVI-LXII] establish the fact that among all
nations speech in verse preceded speech in prose.
70 THE NEW SCIENCE
LXIII
236 The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself ex-
ternally in the body, and only with great difficulty does it come to attend to
itself by means of reflection.
237 This axiom gives us the universal principle of etymology in all lan-
guages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies
to express the things of the mind and spirit.
LXIV
238 The order of ideas must follow the order of things.
LXV
239 This was the order of human things: first the forests, after that the
huts, thence the villages, next the cities and finally the academies.
240 This axiom is a great principle of etymology, for this sequence of
human things sets the pattern for the histories of words in the various native
languages. Thus we observe in the Latin language that almost the whole corpus
of its words had sylvan or rustic origins. For example, lex. First it must have
meant "collection of acorns." Thence we believe is derived ilex, as it were illex,
"the oak" (as certainly aquilex is the "collector of waters"); for the oak pro-
duces the acorns by which the swine are drawn together. Lex was next "a col-
lection of vegetables," from which the latter were called legumina. Later on, at
a time when vulgar letters had not yet been invented for writing down the laws,
lex by a necessity of civil nature must have meant "a collection of citizens" or
the public parliament; so that the presence of the people was the law that
solemnized the wills that were made calatis comitiis, in the presence of the as-
sembled comitia. Finally collecting letters, and making as it were a sheaf of them
in each word, was called legere, "reading."
LXVI
241 Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to com-
fort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury,
and finally go mad and waste their substance.
LXVII
242 The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then
delicate, finally dissolute.
LXVIII
243 In the human race first appear the huge and grotesque, like the
Cyclopes; then the proud and magnanimous, like Achilles; then the valorous
and just, like AHstides and Scipio Africanus; nearer to us, imposing figures with
great semblances of virtue accompanied by great vices, who among the vulgar
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 71
win a name for true glory, like Alexander and Caesar; still later, the melancholy
and reflective, like Tiberius; finally the dissolute and shameless madmen, like
Caligula, Nero, and Domitian.
344 This axiom shows that the first sort were necessary in order to make
one man obey another in the family-state and prepare him to be law-abiding in
the city-state that was to come; the second sort, who naturally did not yield to
their peers, were necessary to establish the aristocratic commonwealths on the
basis of the families; the third sort to open the way for popular liberty; the
fourth to bring in the monarchies; the fifth to establish them; the sixth to over-
throw them.
245 This with the preceding axioms [LXV-LXVII] gives a part of the prin-
ciples of the ideal eternal history traversed in time by every nation in its rise, de-
velopment, maturity, decline and fall.
LXIX
246 Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.
247 This axiom shows that in the nature of human civil things the pub-
lic school of princes is the morality of the peoples.
LXX
248 Let that be granted which is not repugnant to nature and which we
shall later find to be true in fact: that from the nefarious state of the outlaw
world some few of the sturdiest first withdrew and established families, with
whom and by whom they brought the fields under cultivation; and a long while
later the many others also withdrew and took refuge on the lands cultivated
by these fathers.
LXXI
249 Native customs, and above all that of natural liberty, do not change
all at once but by degrees and over a long period of time.
LXXII
250 Since all nations began with the cult of some divinity, in the family
state the fathers must have been the sages in auspicial divinity, the priests who
sacrificed to take the auspices or to make sure of their meaning, and the kings
who brought the divine laws to their families.
LXXIII
251 It is a vulgar tradition that the first to govern the world were kings.
LXXIV
252 It is another vulgar tradition that those were created the first kings
who were the worthiest.
72 THE NEW SCIENCE
LXXV
253 It is yet another vulgar tradition that the first kings were sages,
wherefore Plato expressed the vain wish for those ancient times in which
philosophers reigned or kings were philosophers.
254 All these axioms show that in the persons of the first fathers there
were united wisdom, priesthood and kingship, and the kingship and priesthood
depended on the wisdom, not indeed the esoteric wisdom of philosophers but the
vulgar wisdom of lawgivers. And therefore thenceforward in all nations the
priests wore crowns.
LXXVI
255 It is a vulgar tradition that the first form of government in the
world was the monarchical.
LXXVII
256 But the sixty-seventh axiom with the others following, and in par-
ticular with the corollary of the sixty-ninth, show us that in the family state the
fathers must have exercised a monarchical power, subject only to God, over both
the persons and the property of their children and to a much greater extent over
those of the famuli who had taken refuge on their lands. So they were the
first monarchs of the world, of whom sacred history must be understood to
speak when it calls them patriarchs or father-princes. This monarchical right
was preserved to them for the entire period of the Roman Republic by the Law
of the Twelve Tables: "The family father shall have power of life and death over
his children" (Pafrifamilias ius vitae et necis in liber os esto); from which it
follows that "Whatever the son acquires, he acquires for his father" (Quicquid
filius acquirit, patri acquirti).
LXXVIII
257 The families cannot have taken their name, in keeping with their
origin, from anything but these famuli of the fathers in the then state of nature.
LXXDC
258 The first socii, who are properly companions associated for mutual
advantage, cannot be imagined or understood to have existed in the world
previous to these fugitives who sought to save their lives by taking refuge with
the aforesaid first fathers and who, having been received for their lives, were
obliged to sustain them by cultivating the fields of the fathers.
259 These were the true socii of the heroes. Later they were the plebeians
of the heroic cities and finally the provincials of sovereign peoples.
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 73
LXXX
260 Men come naturally to the feudal system [ragione de' benefizi]
wherever they see a possibility of retaining in it or gaining from it a good and
great share of utility, for such are the benefits [benefizi] which may be hoped for
in civil life.
LXXXI
261 It is characteristic of the strong not to relinquish through laziness
what they have acquired by courage. Rather do they yield, from necessity or for
utility, as little as they can and bit by bit.
262 From these two axioms spring the perennial sources of fiefs, which
are called, with Roman elegance, benefices (beneficia).
LXXXII
263 In all ancient nations we find everywhere clients and clienteles, which
are best understood as vassals and fiefs. Nor can learned writers on feudal law
find apter Latin terms [for the latter] than clientes and clientelae.
264 These last three axioms with the preceding twelve, beginning with
the seventieth, reveal to us the principles of the commonwealths, born of a great
necessity (which we shall later determine) imposed upon the family fathers by
the famuli; a necessity such that the commonwealths naturally took the aristo-
cratic form. For the fathers united themselves in orders to resist the famuli who
had rebelled against them; and, once thus united, to satisfy these famuli and
reduce them to obedience, they conceded to them a sort of rustic fiefs. The fathers
in turn found their own sovereign family powers (which can only be under-
stood on the analogy of noble fiefs) subjected to the sovereign civil authority
of the ruling orders [in which they were now united]. The chiefs of the orders
were called kings; it was their function, as the most courageous, to lead the
fathers in times of revolt among the famuli. If such an origin of cities were
offered as a hypothesis (which later we find to be the fact), it would command
acceptance by its naturalness and simplicity and for the infinite number of civil
effects which depend upon it as their proper cause. In no other way can we
understand how civil power emerged from family power, and the public patri-
mony from private patrimonies, or how the commonwealths had their ele-
ments prepared in the form of an order of few to command and a multitude
of plebeians to obey them. These are the two parts which make up the subject
matter of politics. It will later be shown that civil states could not thus have
been formed from families containing children only [and not famuli].
LXXXHI
265 This law concerning the fields is established as the first agrarian
law of the world, and it would be hard to imagine or conceive one more re-
stricted in nature.
74 THE NEW SCIENCE
266 This agrarian law distinguished the three types of ownership [or
domain (dominium)] which can obtain in civil nature, attached to three classes
of persons: the bonitary, to the plebeians; the quiritary, maintained by arms and
consequently noble, to the fathers; and the eminent, to the order itself, which is
the Seigniory or sovereign power in aristocratic commonwealths.
LXXXIV
267 There is a golden passage in Aristotle's Politics where, in his clas-
sification of commonwealths, he includes the heroic kingdoms in which the
kings administered the laws at home, conducted wars abroad, and were heads
of the state religion.
268 This axiom fits exactly the two heroic kingdoms of Theseus and
Romulus, as we may see of the former in Plutarch's Life of him, and of the
latter in Roman history; supplementing Greek history with Roman, where Tullus
Hostilius administers the law in the accusation against Horatius. And the Ro-
man kings were kings also of sacred things under the name of reges sacrorum;
so that when the kings were driven from Rome, for the sake of certainty in the
divine ceremonies an officer was created to be called rex sacrorum, who was the
head of the fetiales or heralds.
LXXXV
269 There is another golden passage in the Politics where Aristotle states
that the ancient commonwealths had no laws to punish private offenses or to
right private wrongs, and he says that such are the mores of barbarous peoples,
for peoples are in their origins barbarous precisely because they are not yet
tamed by laws,
270 This axiom shows the necessity of duels and reprisals in barbarous
times because in such times judicial laws are lacking.
LXXXVI
271 Golden too is that passage in the Politics where Aristotle says that
in the ancient commonwealths the nobles swore to be eternal enemies of the
plebs.
272 This axiom explains the cause of the haughty, avaricious and cruel
practices of the nobles toward the plebeians, which we see clearly portrayed in
Roman history. For, within the bounds of what has hitherto been mistaken for
popular liberty, for a long time they compelled the plebeians at the latter's ex-
pense to serve them in war, and drowned them in a sr a of usury. Then, as the
wretched plebeians could not meet their claims, they confined them for life in
private prisons to make them pay off their debts by work and toil, and tyran-
nically beat them with rods on their bare shoulders as if they were the most
abject slaves.
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 75
LXXXVII
273 The aristocratic commonwealths are most cautious about going to
war lest they make warriors of the multitude of plebeians.
274 This axiom is the principle of the justice of the Roman arms up to
the Punic wars.
LXXXVIII
275 The aristocratic commonwealths keep the wealth within the order
of the nobility, for wealth adds to the power of this order.
276 This axiom is the principle of Roman clemency in victory; for they
deprived the vanquished only of their arms, and left them in bonitary owner-
ship of everything [else they had], subject to a tolerable tribute. Here too is
the reason why the [Roman] fathers constantly resisted the agrarian laws of the
Gracchi, because they did not wish to enrich the plebs.
LXXXIX
277 Honor is the noblest stimulus to military valor.
XC
278 Peoples are likely to conduct themselves heroically in war if in peace
they compete among themselves for honors, some to retain them, others to
win the merit of attaining them.
279 This axiom is a principle of Roman heroism from the time of the
expulsion of the tyrants down to the Punic wars. Within this period the nobles
naturally dedicated themselves to such a safeguarding of their country as kept
all civil honors safe within their own order, and the piebs undertook the most
noteworthy enterprises to show that they were worthy of the honors held by the
nobles.
XCI
280 The contests waged by the orders in the cities for equality of rights
are the most powerful means of making the commonwealths great.
281 This is another principle of Roman heroism, implemented by three
public virtues: the magnanimity of the plebs in wanting to share the civil rights
and laws of the fathers; the strength of the fathers in keeping them within
their own order; and the wisdom of the jurisconsults in interpreting them and
extending their utility little by little as new cases demanded adjudication. These
are the three proper reasons for the distinction which Roman law attained in
the world.
282 All these axioms, beginning with the eighty-fourth, set ancient Ro-
man history forth in its proper aspect; the following three serve in part the
same purpose.
76 THE NEW SCIENCE
XCII
283 The weak want laws; the powerful withhold them; the ambitious,
in order to win a following, advocate them; princes, in order to equalize the
strong with the weak, protect them.
284 This axiom, by its first and second clauses, is the torch of the heroic
contests in the aristocratic commonwealths, in which the nobles want to keep
the laws a secret monopoly of their order, so that they may depend on their will
and that they may administer them with a royal hand. These are the three
causes adduced by Pomponius the jurisconsult where he relates that the Roman
people desire the Law of the Twelve Tables, complaining against the burden-
someness of "secret, uncertain law and regal power" (jus latcns, inccrtum et
manus regia). And it is the cause of the reluctance of the fathers to give [these
Tables] to the people, insisting that "the customs of the fathers must be pre-
served*' (mores patriot servandoi) and "the laws must not be published" (leges
ferri non oportere), as Dionysius of Halicarnassus states. He was better informed
on Roman matters than Livy, for he wrote of them under the guidance of Mar-
cus Terentius Varro, who was acclaimed "the most learned of the Romans."
On this particular matter he is diametrically opposed to Livy, who in his account
of it says that the nobles (to use his words) "did not spurn the petitions of the
plebs" (desideria plebis non aspernari). Because of this and other greater con-
tradictions observed in our Principles of Universal Law, there being such op-
position between the first authors who wrote of this fable almost five hundred
years afterwards, it will be better not to believe either of the two. The more so
since in the same period it was believed neither by Varro himself, who in his
great work on things divine and human [Antiquitatcs] gave purely Latin
origins to all the institutions divine and human of the Romans, nor by Cicero,
who makes the orator Marcus [i.e. Lucius Licinius] Crassus say in the presence
of Quintus Mucius Scaevola, the prince of jurisconsults of his day, that the
wisdom of the decemvirs surpassed by a great deal that of Draco and Solon,
who gave laws to the Athenians, and that of Lycurgus who gave them to the
Spartans: which is as much as to say that the Laws of the Twelve Tables did
not come to Rome from Athens or Sparta. Here we believe we are getting at the
truth. In Cicero's day the fable was too generally accepted among scholars, born
as it was of the conceit of the learned in giving wisest origins to the wisdom they
profess. This is the point of the words spoken by Crassus himself: "Though all
of you grumble, I shall say what I think" (Fremant omncs, dicam quod scntio).
Cicero's reason, therefore, for having Quintus Mucius present on that first day
only, was to remove any objection to his having an orator speak of the history
of Roman law, the field of knowledge proper to the jurisconsults. (These were
two distinct professions at that time.) For if Crassus had said anything false
on the subject, Mucius would certainly have reproved him for it, as, according
to Pomponius, he reproved Servius Sulpicius (who is present at this same dis-
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 77
cussion), saying to him that "it was a disgrace for a nobleman not to know the
law which was his profession" (turpe cssc patricio viro ius, in quo versaretur,
ignorare).
285 But, more than Cicero and Varro, Polybius gives us an unanswer-
able reason for not believing either Dionysius or Livy. And Polybius without
doubt knew more of politics than these two and lived some two hundred years
nearer the age of the decemvirs than they did. He sets himself (in the sixth
book and the fourth and many following sections in the edition of Jakob Gronov)
to examine carefully the constitutions of the most famous free commonwealths
of his time, and he observes that the Roman constitution is quite different from
that of Athens or Sparta. He finds it to differ from that of Athens even more
than from that of Sparta, though those who compare Attic with Roman law
will have it that it was from Athens rather than from Sparta that the laws came
to order the popular liberty already founded by Brutus. But Polybius observes,
on the other hand, a great similarity between the Roman and the Carthaginian
constitutions. Yet no one has ever dreamed that the freedom of the latter was
ordered by the laws of Greece; indeed, so far is this from being true that there
was a law in Carthage expressly forbidding the Carthaginians to learn Greek.
And how is it that such a learned writer on commonwealths does not investigate
the reason of this difference and does not raise on this point the very natural and
obvious question: How can the Roman and Athenian commonwealths be differ-
ent and yet ordered by the same laws, and the Roman and Carthaginian com-
monwealths be similar but ordered by different laws? To absolve him of so
flagrant an oversight, we are compelled to say that in the time of Polybius there
had not yet been born at Rome this fable that the Greek laws had been brought
there from Athens to order free popular government.
286 This same axiom, by its third clause, opens the way for the ambitious
in the popular commonwealths to make themselves monarchs by seconding a
natural desire of the plebs, who, not understanding universals, want a law for
every particular case. Thus Sulla, the head of the party of the nobles, when he
had defeated Marius, the head of the party of the plebs, and was reorganizing
the popular state with an aristocratic government, remedied the multitude of
laws by the quacstioncs pcrpetuac [a permanent tribunal for criminal investiga-
tion].
287 And this same axiom, by its last clause, is the hidden reason why, be-
ginning with Augustus, the Roman emperors made innumerable laws for pri-
vate cases, and why the sovereigns and powers all over Europe received into
their kingdoms and free commonwealths the Corpus of Roman Civil Law and
that of Canon Law.
XCIII
288 Since the door of honors in the popular commonwealths is wide open
by law to the greedy multitude which is in command, in times of peace nothing
78 THE NEW SCIENCE
remains but to struggle for power, not by law but by arms, and use the power
to make laws for one's own enrichment. Such were the agrarian laws of the
Gracchi at Rome. The result is civil wars at home and unjust wars abroad at
the same time,
289 In this axiom Roman heroism is confirmed by contrast for the en-
tire period before the Gracchi.
XCIV
290 Natural liberty is fiercer in proportion as property attaches more
closely to the persons of its owners; and civil servitude is clapped on with goods
of fortune not essential to life.
291 The first part of this axiom is another principle of the natural hero-
ism of the first peoples; the second part is the natural principle of monarchies.
XCV
292 At first men desire to be free of subjection and attain equality; wit-
ness the plebs in the aristocratic commonwealths, which finally turn popular.
Then they attempt to surpass their equals; witness the plebs in the popular com-
monwealths, later corrupted into commonwealths of the powerful. Finally they
wish to put themselves above the laws; witness the anarchies or unlimited popu-
lar commonwealths, than which there is no greater tyranny, for in them there
are as many tyrants as there are bold and dissolute men in the cities. At this
juncture the plebs, warned by the ills they suffer, and casting about for a remedy,
seek shelter under monarchies. This is the natural royal law by which Tacitus
legitimizes the Roman monarchy under Augustus, "who, when the world was
wearied by civil strife, subjected it to empire under the title of Prince" (qui
cuncta, bellis civilibus fessa, nomine "principis" sub imperium accepit).
XCVI
293 When the first cities were established on the basis of the families,
the nobles, by reason of their native lawless liberty, were opposd to checks and
burdens; witness the aristocratic commonwealths in which the nobles are lords.
Later they are forced by the plebs, greatly increased in numbers and trained in
war, to submit to laws and burdens equally with their plebeians; witness the
nobles in the popular commonwealths. Finally, in order to preserve their com-
fortable existence, they are naturally inclined to accept the supremacy of one
ruler; witness the nobles under the monarchies.
294 These two axioms with the others preceding, from the sixty-sixth
on, are the principles of the ideal eternal history above referred to.
XCVII
295 Let it be granted, as a postulate not repugnant to reason, that after
the flood men hved first on the mountains, somewhat later came down to the
plains, and finally after long ages dared to approach the shores of the sea.
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 79
XCVIII
296 In Strabo [XIII, i, 25] there is a golden passage of Plato [Laws III,
677 ff.] saying that, after the local Ogygian and Deucalionian floods, men dwelt
in caves m the mountains; and he identifies these first men with the cyclopes, in
whom elsewhere he recognizes the first family fathers of the world. Later they
dwelt on the mountain sides, and he sees them represented by Dardanus, the
builder of Pergamum which later became the citadel of Troy. Finally they
came down to the plains; this he sees represented by Ilus, by whom Troy was
moved onto the plain near the sea, and from whom it took the name of Ilium.
XCIX
297 It is also an ancient tradition that Tyre was founded first inland and
later was moved onto the coast of the Phoenician sea; as it is certain history that
it was transported from the shore onto a close-lying island, from which Alexander
the Great reattached it to the mainland [by a causeway].
298 These two axioms and the preceding postulate show is that the in-
land nations were founded first and later the maritime. And they give us a
great argument to prove the antiquity of the Hebrew people, which was founded
by Noah in Mesopotamia, the country farthest inland of the first habitable
world; so it must have been the most ancient of all nations. And this is confirmed
by the fact that the first monarchy was founded there, that of the Assyrians
over the Chaldean people, from whom came the first wise men of the world,
their prince being Zoroaster.
299 Only by extreme necessities of life are men led to abandon their own
lands, which are naturally dear to those native to them. Nor do they leave them
temporarily, except from greed to get rich by trade, or from anxiety to keep what
they have acquired.
300 This axiom is the principle of the transmigrations of peoples. It is
an induction from the heroic maritime colonies, the inundations of the barbarians
(of whifh alone Wolfgang Latius wrote), the latest known Roman colonies,
and the colonies of Europeans in the Indies.
301 And this same axiom shows us that the lost races of the three sons
of Noah must be supposed to have gone off into bestial wandering, fleeing from
beasts (of which the great forest of the earth must have held an unhappy
abundance), pursuing the shy and indocile women (for in such a savage state
they must have been extremely indocile and shy), and then later seeking pas-
tureland and water, in order to account for their being scattered over the whole
earth by the time when the heavens first thundered after the flood. It was thus
that every gentile nation began with its own Jove. For if these lost races had
persisted in humanity as the people of God did, they would likewise have re-
mained in Asia. For both because of the vastness of that great part of the world
8o THE NEW SCIENCE
and because of the paucity of men in those days, there was no compelling rea-
son for their abandoning it, since it is not a natural custom to abandon one's
native land through caprice.
CI
302 The Phoenicians were the first navigators of the ancient world.
CII
303 Nations in their barbarous condition are impenetrable; they must
either be broken into from outside by war or voluntarily opened to strangers
for the advantages of trade. Thus Psammeticus opened Egypt to the Ionian and
Carian Greeks, whose renown for maritime traffic must have been second to
that of the Phoenicians. So great was their wealth that the temple of Samian
Juno was founded in Ionia, and the mausoleum of Artemisia was built in Caria;
and these were two of the seven wonders of the world. The glory of this trade
was inherited by the Rhodians; in the mouth of their port they erected the
great Colossus of the Sun, which was also counted among the above-mentioned
wonders. So too the Chinese, with a view to the advantages of trade, have re-
cently opened their country to us Europeans.
304 These three axioms give us the principle of a new etymologicon for
words of certainly foreign origin, different from that mentioned above [240] for
native words. It can also give us the history of nations carried one after another
into foreign lands by colonization. Thus Naples was first called Sirena (siren),
a Syriac word; which is evidence that the Syrians, that is the Phoenicians, had
been the first to establish a colony there, for commercial purposes. Later it was
called Parthenope, in heroic Greek, and finally Neapolis, in vulgar Greek;
names which prove that the Greeks had afterwards settled there to establish
trading posts. From this succession there was sure to emerge a mixed language
of Phoenician and Greek, in which it is said that the emperor Tiberius took
greater pleasure than in pure Greek. Thus also on the gulf of Tarentum there
was a Syrian colony called Siris, whose inhabitants were called Sirites. It was
later called by the Greeks Polieion, whence the appellation Polias was given to
Minerva, who had a temple there.
305 This axiom moreover gives a scientific foundation to the thesis of
Giambullari that the Etruscan language is of Syriac origin. Such a language
could have come only from the most ancient Phoenicians, who, by the axiom
above laid down [302] were the first navigators of the ancient world. For later
this glory belonged to the Carian and Ionian Greeks, and finally to the Rhodians.
cm
306 The postulate must needs be granted that on the shore of Latium
some Greek colony had been set up, which, after conquest and destruction by
the Romans, remained buried in the darkness of antiquity.
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 81
307 If this is not granted, anyone who reflects systematically upon antiq-
uities must be baffled by Roman history when it speaks of Hercules and
Evander, Arcadians and Phrygians, within the boundaries of Latium, and of
Scrvius Tullius as a Greek, Tarquinius Priscus as the son of Demaratus the
Corinthian, and Aeneas as the founder of the Roman people. Tacitus [Annals
XI, 14] certainly speaks of the resemblance between Roman and Greek letters;
yet at the time of Servius Tullius, in the opinion of Livy, the Romans never even
heard of the famous name of Pythagoras, who was teaching in his most cele-
brated school at Croton, and they did not make the acquaintance of the Greeks
in Italy until the occasion of the war with Tarentum [116], which led to the
later war with Pyrrhus and the Greeks across the sea.
CIV
308 The remark of Dion Cassius [i.e. Chrysostom] is worthy of con-
sideration, that custom is like a king and law like a tyrant; which we must
understand as referring to reasonable custom and to law not animated by natural
reason.
309 This axiom decides by implication the great dispute "whether law
resides in nature or in the opinion of men," which comes to the same thing
as that propounded in the corollary of the eighth axiom [135], "whether man is
naturally sociable." In the first place, the natural law of nations was ordained by
custom (which Dion says commands us by pleasure like a king) and not by
law (which Dion says commands us by force like a tyrant). For it began in
human customs springing from the common nature of all nations (which is the
proper subject of our Science) and it preserves human society. Moreover, there
is nothing more natural (for there is nothing more pleasant) than observing nat-
ural customs. For all these reasons, human nature, in which such customs have
had their origin, is perforce sociable.
310 This axiom, with the eighth and its corollary, shows that man is
unjust not by nature in the absolute sense, but by nature fallen and weak. Con-
sequently it demonstrates the first principle of the Christian religion, which is
Adam before the fall, in the ideal perfection in which he must have been created
by God. And therefore it demonstrates the Catholic principles of grace: that it
operates in the man who has privation and not negation of good works and who
thus has an inefficacious power for them, and that grace is efficacious therefore
[to supply this lack]; that for that reason it cannot exist without the principle
of free will, which God naturally aids by His providence (as has been said
above in the second corollary of the same eighth axiom [136]), with regard to
which the Christian religion is in accord with all others. This is what Grotius,
Seldcn and Pufcndorf should have founded their systems upon before everything
else, in agreement with the Roman jurisconsults who define "the natural law of
nations as having been ordained by divine providence."
8i THE NEW SCIENCE
cv
311 The natural law of nations is coeval with the customs of the nations,
conforming one with another in virtue of a common human sense, without any
reflection and without one nation following the example of another,
312 This axiom, with the saying of Dion quoted in the preceding axiom,
proves that providence, being sovereign over the affairs of men, is the ordainer
of the natural law of nations.
313 This same axiom establishes the difference between the natural law
of the Hebrews, the natural law of nations, and the natural law of the philos-
ophers. For whereas the gentile nations had only the ordinary help of provi-
dence, the Hebrews had extraordinary help from the true God; on this account
the latter divided the whole world of nations into Hebrews and gentiles. The
philosophers reason it out more completely than the gentiles are wont to, for
they did not appear until some two thousand years after the gentile nations were
founded. On account of their failure to observe these differences between the
three [natural laws], the three systems of Grotius, Selden and Pufendorf must
fall.
CVI
314 Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of
which they treat.
315 This axiom, placed here for [its application to] the particular matter
of the natural law of nations, is universally used in all the matters which are
herein discussed. It might have been laid down among the general axioms; but
it has been placed here because in this more than any other particular matter its
truth and the importance of using it are apparent.
CVII
316 The [first] gentes began before the cities; they were called by the
Latins gentes maiores or ancient noble houses like those of the Roman fathers
of whom Romulus constituted the senate, and, with the senate, the city of Rome.
On the other hand they called gentes minores the new noble houses founded
after the cities; those for example with whose fathers Junius Brutus, after the
expulsion of the kings, replenished the senate when it had been depleted by the
deaths of the senators executed by order of Tarquinius Superbus,
CVIII
317 There was a corresponding twofold division of the gods. First
there were those of the gentes maiores, that is, gods who were consecrated by
the families before the time of the cities. Among the Greeks and Latins these
were certainly twelve in number. We shall show that such was also the case
among the first Assyrians, Chaldeans, Phoenicians and Egyptians. Among the
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 83
Greeks their number was so well known that they were called simply "the
twelve." These gods are brought confusedly together in a Latin distich quoted in
our Principles of Universal Law. Here, however, in Book Two, following a nat-
ural theogony or generation of the gods framed naturally in the minds of the
Greeks, they will be set forth in this order: Jove, Juno; Diana, Apollo; Vulcan,
Saturn, Vesta; Mars, Venus; Minerva, Mercury; Neptune. Secondly, there were
the gods of the gentes minores, that is to say those consecrated later by the peo-
ples; for example Romulus, whom after his death the Roman people called the
god Quirinus.
318 By these three axioms the three systems of Grotius, Selden and
Pufendorf are found wanting in their beginnings. For they begin with nations
reciprocally related in the society of the entire human race. Whereas, among all
the first nations, as we shall show here, the race began in the time of the families,
under the gods of the so-called gentes maiores.
cix
319 Men of limited ideas take for law what the words expressly say.
CX
320 Golden is the definition which Ulpian [0.48.4.1.1] assigns to civil
equity: "a kind of probable judgment, not naturally known to all men" (as
natural equity is) "but to those few who, being eminently endowed with
prudence, experience, or learning, have come to know what things are necessary
for the conservation of human society" (probabilis quaedam ratio, non omnibus
homimbus naturahter cognita, sed paucis tantum, qui, prudcntia, usu t doctrina
praediti, didtcerunt quae ad soaetatis humanae conservationem sunt necessaria).
This is what is nowadays called "reason of state."
CXI
321 The certitude of the laws is an obscurity of judgment backed only
by authority, so that we find them harsh in application, yet are obliged to apply
them by their certitude. In good Latin certum means "particularized," or, as the
schools say, "individuated"; so that, in overelegant Latin, certum and commune
are opposed to each other.
322 This axiom [319] and the two following definitions [320, 321] con-
stitute the principle of strict law. Its rule is civil equity, by whose certitude, that
is to say by the determinate particularity of whose words, the barbarians, [men]
of particular [not universal] ideas, are naturally satisfied, and such is the law
they think is their due. So that what Ulpian says in such cases, "the law is harsh,
but so it is written" (lex dura est, sed scripta est), may be put in finer Latin and
with greater legal elegance, "the law is harsh, but it is certain" (lex dura est,
sed certa est).
84 THE NEW SCIENCE
CXII
323 Intelligent men take for law whatever impartial utility dictates in
each case.
CXIII
324 The truth of the laws is a certain light and splendor with which nat-
ural reason illuminates them; so that jurisconsults are often in the habit of say-
ing vcrum est for aequum est.
325 This definition and the mth [321] are particular propositions
whose purpose is to apply to the particular matter of the natural law of nations
the two general definitions [137, 138] which trejt of the true and the certain in
general with a view to conclusions in all the matters that are herein treated.
cxiv
326 The natural equity of fully developed human law is a practice of
wisdom in affairs of utility, since wisdom in its broad sense is nothing but the
science of making such use of things as their nature dictates.
327 This axiom [323] and the two following definitions [324, 326] con-
stitute the principle of mild law. Its rule is the natural equity which is connat-
ural with civilized nations. This is the public school from which, as we shall
show, the philosophers emerged.
328 All these last six propositions [319, 320, 321, 323, 324, 326] establish
the fact that the natural law of nations was ordained by providence. In order
that the nations might be preserved, and since they had to live for centuries in-
capable of truth and natural equity (the latter of which the philosophers later
clarified), providence permitted them to cleave to certitude and civil equity,
which guards scrupulously the words of decrees and laws, and to be led by the
words to observe them generally, even in cases where they proved harsh.
329 Now the fact that the three princes of the doctrine of the natural law
of nations knew nothing of these six propositions caused all three of them to err
in concert in establishing their systems. For they believed that natural equity in
its perfect form had been understood by the gentile nations from their first be-
ginnings; they did not reflect that it took some two thousand years for philos-
ophers to appear in any of them; and they took no account of the particular as-
sistance which a single people received from the true God.
[SECTION III]
PRINCIPLES
330 Now, in order to make trial whether the propositions hitherto enu-
merated as elements of this Science can give form to the materials prepared in
the Chronological Table at the beginning, we beg the reader to consider what-
ever has been written concerning the principles of any subject in the whole of
gentile knowledge, human and divine. Let him then see if it is inconsistent with
these propositions, whether with all or some or one. For inconsistency with one
would amount to inconsistency with all, since each accords with all Certainly
on making such a comparison he will perceive that it is a tissue of confused
memories, of the fancies of a disordered imagination; that none of it is be-
gotten of intelligence, which has been rendered useless by the two conceits
enumerated in the Axioms [125, 127]. For on the one hand the conceit of the
nations, each believing itself to have been the first in the world, leaves us no
hope of getting the principles of our Science from the philologians. And on the
other hand the conceit of the scholars, who will have it that what they know must
have been eminently understood from the beginning of the world, makes us
despair of getting them from the philosophers. So, for purposes of this inquiry,
we must reckon as if there were no books in the world.
331 But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity,
so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never-failing light of a
truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been
made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the
modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but
marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of
the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they
should have neglected the study of the world of nations or civil world, which,
since men had made it, men could hope to know. This aberration was a conse-
quence of that infirmity of the human mind, noted in the Axioms [236], by
which, immersed and buried in the body, it naturally inclines to take notice of
bodily things, and finds the effort to attend to itself too laborious; just as the
bodily eye sees all objects outside itself but needs a mirror to see itself.
86 THE NEW SCIENCE
332 Now since this world of nations has been made by men, let us see
in what things all men agree and always have agreed. For these things will
be able to give us the universal and eternal principles (such as every science must
have) on which all nations were founded and still preserve themselves.
333 We observe that all nations, barbarous as well as civilized, though
separately founded because remote from each other in time and space, keep
these three human customs: all have some religion, all contract solemn mar-
riages, all bury their dead. And in no nation, however savage and crude, are
any human activities celebrated with more elaborate ceremonies and more
sacred solemnity than religion, marriage and burial. For, by the axiom [144]
that "uniform ideas, born among peoples unknown to each other, must have
a common ground of truth," it must have been dictated to all nations that
from these three institutions humanity began among them all, and therefore
they must be most devoutly observed by them all, so that the world should not
again become a bestial wilderness. For this reason we have taken these three
eternal and universal customs as three first principles of this Science.
334 Let not our first principle be accused of falsehood by the modern
travelers who narrate that peoples of Brazil, South Africa and other nations
of the new world live in t society without any knowledge of God, as Antoine
Arnauld believes to be the case also of the inhabitants of the islands called
Antilles. Persuaded perhaps by them, Bayle affirms in his treatise on comets
that peoples can live in justice without the light of God. This is a bolder state-
ment than Polybius ventured in the dictum for which he has been acclaimed
[179], that if the world had philosophers, living in justice by reason and not
by laws, it would have no need of religions. These are travelers' tales, to pro-
mote the sale of their books by the narration of portents. Certainly Andreas
Riidiger in his Physics, pretentiously entitled divine [Physica divtna] and pur-
porting to show the only middle path between atheism and superstition, is
gravely reproved for this opinion by the censors of the University of Geneva.
They charge that "he states it with too much assurance," which is the same as
saying with not a little boldness. (Yet in the Republic of Geneva, as being free
and popular, there would be considerable freedom in writing.) For all nations
believe in a provident divinity, yet through all the length of years and all the
breadth of this civil world it has been possible to find only four primary religions.
The first is that of the Hebrews, whence came that of the Christians, both be-
lieving in the divinity of an infinite free mind. The third is that of the gentiles,
who believe in the divinity of a plurality of gods, each imagined as composed
of body and of free mind. Hence, when they wish to signify the divinity that
rules and preserves the world, they speak of deos immortales. The fourth and
last is that of the Mohammedans, who believe in the divinity of one god, an
infinite free mind in an infinite body, for they look forward to pleasures of the
senses as rewards in the other life.
335 No nation has believed in a god all body or in a god all mind but
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 87
not free. And so neither the Epicureans who attribute to God body alone, and
chance together with body, nor the Stoics who (in this respect the Spinozists
of their day) make God an infinite mind, subject to fate, in an infinite body,
could reason of commonwealths or laws; and Benedict Spinoza speaks of the
commonwealth as of a society of shopkeepers. Cicero was indeed right when
he told the Epicurean Atticus that he could not discuss laws with him unless he
first granted the existence of divine providence. Such is the compatibility of
these two sects, the Stoic and the Epicurean, with Roman jurisprudence, which
takes divine providence for its first principle!
336 In the second place, the opinion that the sexual unions which cer-
tainly take place between free men and free women without solemn matrimony
are free of natural wickedness [i.e. do not offend the law of nature], all the
nations of the world have branded as false by the human customs with which
they all religiously celebrate marriages, thereby determining that this sin is
bestial, though in venial degree. And for this reason: such parents, since they
are held together by no necessary bond of law, are bound to abandon their nat-
ural children. Since their parents may separate at any time, if they are abandoned
by both, the children must lie exposed to be devoured by dogs. If humanity,
public or private, does not bring them up, they will have to grow up with no
one to teach them religion, language, or any other human custom. So that, as
for them, they are bound to cause this world of nations, enriched and adorned
by so many beautiful arts of humanity, to revert to the great ancient forest
through which in their nefarious feral wanderings once roamed the foul beasts
of Orpheus, among whom bestial venery was practiced by sons with mothers and
by fathers with daughters. This is the infamous nefas of the outlaw world,
which Socrates by rather inappropriate physical reasons tried to prove was for-
bidden by nature, whereas it is human nature that forbids it; for such relation-
ships are abhorred naturally by all nations, nor were they ever practiced by any
save in their last stage of corruption, as among the Persians.
337 Finally, |to realize] what a great principle of humanity burial is,
imagine a feral state in which human bodies remain unburied on the surface
of the earth as food for crows and dogs. Certainly this bestial custom will be
accompanied by uncultivated fields and uninhabited cities. Men will go about
like swine eating the acorns found amidst the putrefaction of their dead. And
so with good reason burials were characterized by the sublime phrase "com-
pacts of the human race** (foedera generis humant), and with less grandeur
were described by Tacitus as "fellowships of humanity" (humanitatis com-
merda). Furthermore, it is an opinion in which all gentile nations have cer-
tainly concurred, that the souls of the unburied remain restless on the earth and
go wandering about their bodies, and consequently that they do not die with
their bodies but are immortal. That such was the consensus of the ancient bar-
barous nations may be inferred from what we are told of the [present] peoples
of Guinea by Hugo van Linschooten; of those of Peru and Mexico, by Acosta;
88 THE NEW SCIENCE
of the inhabitants of Virginia, by Thomas Harriot; of those of New England, by
Richard Whitbourne; of those of the kingdom of Siam, by Joost Schoutcn. Thus
Seneca [Ep. CXVH, 5-6] concludes: "When we discuss immortality, we are in-
fluenced in no small degree by the general opinion of mankind, who either fear
or worship the spirits of the lower world. I make the most of this general belief."
(Quurn de immortalitatc loquimur, non Icvc momentum apud nos habet con-
sensus hominum aut timentium inferos aut colentium: hac persuasions publica
utor.)
[SECTION IV]
METHOD
338 To complete the establishment of the principles which have been
adopted for this Science, it remains in this first book to discuss the method which
it should follow. It must begin where its subject matter began, as we said in the
Axioms [314]. We must therefore go back with the philologians and fetch it
from the stones of Deucalion and Pyrrha, from the rocks of Amphion, from
the men who sprang from the furrows of Cadmus or the hard oak of Vergil.
With the philosophers we must fetch it from the frogs of Epicurus, from the
cicadas of Hobbcs, from the simpletons of Grotius; from the men cast into this
world without care or aid of God, of whom Pufendorf speaks, as clumsy and
wild as the so-called Patagonian giants, who are said to be found near the
strait of Magellan; which is as much as to say from the cyclopes of Homer in
whom Plato recognizes the first fathers in the state of the families. (This is the
science the philologians and philosophers have given us of the beginnings of
humanity!) Our treatment of it must take its start from the time these creatures
began to think humanly. In their monstrous savagery and unbridled bestial free-
dom there was no means to tame the former or bridle the latter but the fright-
ful thought of some divinity, the fear of whom, as we said in the Axioms [177],
is the only powerful means of reducing to duty a liberty gone wild. To discover
the way in which this first human thinking arose in the gentile world, we
encountered exasperating difficulties which have cost us the research of a good
twenty years. [We had] to descend from these human and refined natures of
ours to those quite wild and savage natures, which we cannot at all imagine and
can apprehend only with great effort.
339 By reason of all this, we must start from some notion of God such
as even the most savage, wild and monstrous men do not lack. That notion we
show to be this: that man, fallen into despair of all the succors of nature, de-
sires something superior to save him. But something superior to nature is God,
and this is the light that God has shed on all men. Confirmation may be found in
a common human custom, that libertines grown old, feeling their natural forces
fail, turn naturally to religion.
9 o THE NEW SCIENCE
340 But these first men, who later became the princes of the gentile
nations, must have done their thinking under the strong impulsion of violent
passions, as beasts do. We must therefore proceed from a vulgar metaphysics,
such as we have mentioned in the Axioms [182] and such as we shall find the
theology of the poets to have been, and seek by its aid that frightful thought of
some divinity which imposed form and measure on the bestial passions of these
lost men and thus transformed them into human passions. From this thought
must have sprung the impulse proper to the human will, to hold in check the
motions impressed on the mind by the body, so as either to quiet them alto-
gether, as becomes the sage, or at least to direct them to better use, as becomes the
civil man. This control over the motion of their bodies is certainly an effect of
the freedom of the human will, and thus of free will, which is the home and
seat of all the virtues, and among the other* of justice. When informed by
justice, the will is the fount of all that is just and of all the laws dictated by
justice. But to endow bodies with impulse amounts to giving them freedom to
regulate their motions, whereas all bodies are by nature necessary agents. And
what the theorists of mechanics call powers, forces, impulses, are insensible mo-
tions of bodies, by which they approach their centers of gravity, as ancient
mechanics had it, or depart from their centers of motion, as modern mechanics
has it.
341 But men because of their corrupted nature are under the tyranny
of self-love, which compels them to make private utility their chief guide. Seek-
ing everything useful for themselves and nothing for their companions, they
cannot bring their passions under control to direct them toward justice. We
thereby establish the fact that man in the bestial state desires only his own wel-
fare; having taken wife and begotten children, he desires his own welfare along
with that of his family; having entered upon civil life, he desires his own wel-
fare along with that of his city; when its rule is extended over several peoples,
he desires his own welfare along with that of the nation; when the nations arc
united by wars, treaties of peace, alliances and commerce, he desires his own
welfare along with that of the entire human race. In all these conditions man
desires principally his own utility. Therefore it is only by divine providence that
he can be held within these orders to practice justice as a member of the society
of the family, the state, and finally of mankind. Unable to attain all the utilities
he wishes, he is constrained by these orders to seek those which arc his due; and
this is called just. That which regulates all human justice is therefore divine
justice, which is administered by divine providence to preserve human society.
342 In one of its principal aspects, this Science must therefore be a ra-
tional civil theology of divine providence, which seems hitherto to have been
lacking. For the philosophers have either been altogether ignorant of it, as the
Stoics and the Epicureans were, the latter asserting that human affairs are agi-
tated by a blind concourse of atoms, the former that they are drawn by a deaf
[inexorable] chfcin of cause and effect; or they have considered it solely in the
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES 91
order of natural things, giving the name of natural theology to the metaphysics
in which they contemplate this attribute [i.e. the providence] of God, and in
which they confirm it by the physical order observed in the motions of such
bodies as the spheres and the elements and in the final cause observed in other
and minor natural things. But they ought to have studied it in the economy of
civil things, in keeping with the full meaning of applying to providence the
term divinity, from divinari, to divine; that is, to understand what is hidden
from men, the future, or what is hidden in them, their consciousness. It is this
that makes up the first and principal part of the subject matter of jurisprudence,
namely the divine things on which depend the human things which make up
its other and complementary part. Our new Science must therefore be a demon-
stration, so to speak, of the historical fact of providence, for it must be a history
of the forms of order which, without human discernment or intent, and often
against the designs of men, providence has given to this great city of the human
race. For though this world has been created in time and particular, the orders
established therein by providence are universal and eternal.
343 In contemplation of this infinite and eternal providence our Science
finds certain divine proofs by which it is confirmed and demonstrated. Since
divine providence has omnipotence as minister, it develops its orders by means
as easy as the natural customs of men. Since it has infinite wisdom as counselor,
whatever it establishes is order. Since it has for its end its own immeasurable
goodness, whatever it ordains must be directed to a good always superior to
that which men have proposed to themselves.
344 In the deplorable obscurity of the beginnings of the nations and in
the innumerable variety of their customs, for a divine argument which embraces
all human things, no sublimer proofs can be desired than those provided by
the aforesaid naturalness, order and end (the preservation of the human race).
These proofs will become luminous and distinct when we reflect with what
ease things arc brought into being, by occasions arising far apart and some-
times quite contrary to the proposals of men, yet fitting together of them-
selves. Such proofs omnipotence affords. Compare the things with one another
and observe the order by which those are now born in their proper times and
places which ought now to be born, and others deferred for birth in theirs (and
all the beauty of order, according to Horace, consists in this). Such proofs
eternal wisdom provides. Consider, finally, if in these occasions, places and
times we can conceive how other divine benefits could arise by which, in view
of the particular needs and ills of men, human society could be better conducted
or preserved. Such proofs the eternal goodness of God will give.
345 Thus the proper and consecutive proof here adduced will consist
in comparing and reflecting whether our human mind, in the series of pos-
sibilities it is permitted to understand, and so far as it is permitted to do so,
can conceive more or fewer or different causes than those from which issue the
effects of this civil world. In doing this the reader will experience in his mortal
92 THE NEW SCIENCE
body a divine pleasure as he contemplates in the divine ideas this world of na-
tions in all the extent of its places, times and varieties. And he will find that he
has in effect convinced the Epicureans that their chance cannot wander fool-
ishly about and everywhere find a way out, and the Stoics that their eternal
chain of causes, to which they will have it the world is chained, itself hangs
upon the omnipotent, wise and beneficent will of the best and greatest God.
346 These sublime proofs of natural theology will be confirmed for us
by the following sorts of logical proofs. In reasoning of the origins of things
divine and human in the gentile world, we reach those first beginnings beyond
which it is vain curiosity to demand others earlier; and this is the defining
character of [first] principles. We explain the particular ways in which they
come into being, that is to say, their nature, the explanation of which is the dis-
tinguishing mark of science. And finally [these proofs] are confirmed by the
eternal properties [the things] preserve, which could not be what they are if
the things had not come into being just as they did, in those particular times,
places and fashions, which is to say with those particular natures, as we have
set forth in two axioms [147, 148],
347 In search of these natures of human things our Science proceeds by
a severe analysis of human thoughts about the human necessities or utilities of
social life, which are the, two perennial springs of the natural law of nations,
as we have remarked in the Axioms [141]. In its second principal aspect, our
Science is therefore a history of human ideas, on which it seems the metaphysics
of the human mind must proceed. This queen of the sciences, by the axiom
[314] that "the sciences must begin where their subject matters began/* took
its start when the first men began to think humanly, and not when the
philosophers began to reflect on human ideas (as in an erudite and scholarly little
book recently published [by Brucker] under the title Hutoria philosophica doc-
trinae de ideis, which comes down to the latest controversies between the two
foremost minds of our age, Leibniz and Newton).
348 To determine the times and places for such a history, that is, when
and where these human thoughts were born, and thus to give it certainty by
means of its own (so to speak) metaphysical chronology and geography, our
Science applies a likewise metaphysical art of criticism with regard to the
founders of these same nations, in which it took more than a thousand years for
those writers to come forward with whom philological criticism has hitherto
been occupied. And the criterion our criticism employs, in accordance with
an axiom above stated [142], is that taught by divine providence and common
to all nations, namely the common sense of the humcn race, determined by
the necessary harmony of human things, in which all the beauty of the civil
world consists. The decisive sort of proof in our Science is therefore this: that,
once these orders were established by divine providence, the course of the affairs
of the nations had to be, must now be and will have to be such as our Science
BOOK I. ESTABLISHMENr OF PRINCIPLES 93
demonstrates, even if infinite worlds were produced from time to time through
eternity, which is certainly not the case.
349 Our Science therefore comes to describe at the same time an ideal
eternal history traversed in time by the history of every nation in its rise, progress,
maturity, decline and fall. Indeed we go so far as to assert that whoever medi-
tates this Science tells himself this ideal eternal history only so far as he makes
it by that proof "it had, has, and will have to be." For the first indubitable prin-
ciple above posited [331] is that this world of nations has certainly been made
by men, and its guise must therefore be found within the modifications of our
own human mind. And history cannot be more certain than when he who
creates the things also describes them. Thus our Science proceeds exactly as
docs geometry, which, while it constructs out of its elements or contemplates
the world of quantity, itself creates it; but with a reality greater in proportion
to that of the orders having to do with human affairs, in which there arc neither
points, lines, surfaces, nor figures. And this very fact is an argument, O reader,
that these proofs arc of a kind divine, and should give thee a divine pleasure;
since in God knowledge and creation are one and the same thing.
350 By the definitions of truth and certitude above proposed [138], men
were for a long period incapable of truth and of reason, which is the fount of
that inner justice by which the intellect is satisfied. This justice was practiced
by the Hebrews, who, illuminated by the true God, were by his divine law
forbidden even to have unjust thoughts, about which no mortal lawgiver ever
troubled himself. (For the Hebrews believed in a God all mind who searches the
hearts of men, and the gentiles believed in gods composed of bodies and mind
who could not do so.) This same inner justice was later reasoned out by the
philosophers, who did not arise until two thousand years after the nations were
founded. In the meantime the nations were governed by the certitude of author-
ity, that is, by the same criterion which is used by our metaphysical criticism;
namely the common sense of the human race, which we have defined above in
the elements [142], and on which the conscience of all nations reposes. So that,
in this [third] principal regard, our Science comes to be a philosophy of au-
thority, which is the fount of the outer justice of which the moral theologians
speak. Of such authority account should have been taken by the three princes
of the doctrine of the natural law of nations, and not of that drawn from pas-
sages in the writers. For the authority of which we speak reigned among the
nations for more than a thousand years before writers could arise, and they
could have taken no cognizance of it. For that reason Grotius, more learned and
erudite than either of the others, combats the Roman jurisconsults in almost
every particular detail of this doctrine; but all his blows fall short, for the juris-
consults established their principles of justice on the certitude of the authority
of the human race, not on the authority of the learned.
351 These are the philosophic proofs our Science will use, and consc-
94 THE NEW SCIENCE
qucntly those which arc absolutely necessary for pursuing it. The philological
proofs must come last. They all reduce to the following kinds:
352 First, that our mythologies agree with the results of our meditations,
not by force and distortion, but directly, easily and naturally; that they will be
seen to be civil histories of the first peoples, who are everywhere found to have
been naturally poets.
353 Second, that the heroic phrases, as here explained in the full truth
of the sentiments and the full propriety of the expressions, also agree.
354 Third, that the etymologies of the native languages also agree, which
tell us the histories of the things signified by the words, beginning with their
original and proper meanings and pursuing the natural progress of their meta-
phors according to the order of the ideas, on which the history of languages
must proceed, as we have premised in the Axioms [238-240].
355 Fourth, the mental vocabulary of human social things, which are
the same in substance as felt by all nations but diversely expressed in language
according to their diverse manifestations, is exhibited to be such as we conceived
it in the Axioms [161].
356 Fifth, truth is sifted from falsehood in everything that has been pre-
served for us through long centuries by those vulgar traditions which, since
they have been preserved for so long a time and by entire peoples, must by an
axiom above stated [149] have had a public ground of truth.
357 Sixth, the great fragments of antiquity, hitherto useless to science
because they lay neglected, broken and scattered, shed great light when cleaned,
pieced together and set in place.
358 Seventh and last, to all these things, as to their necessary causes,
are assigned all the effects narrated by certain history.
359 These philological proofs enable us to see in fact the things we have
meditated in idea concerning this world of nations, in accordance with Bacon's
method of philosophizing, which is "think [and] see" (cogitare videre). Thus
it is that with the help of the preceding philosophical proofs, the philological
proofs which follow both confirm their own authority by reason and at the
same time confirm reason by their authority.
360 From all that has been set forth in general concerning the establish-
ment of the principles of this Science, we conclude that, since its principles arc
divine providence, moderation of the passions by marriage, and immortality of
human souls [witnessed] by burial, and since the criterion it uses is that what
is felt to be just by all men or by the majority must be the rule of social life
(and on these principles and this criterion there is agreement between the vul-
gar wisdom of all lawgivers and the esoteric wisdom of the philosophers of
greatest repute), these must be the bounds of human reason. And let him who
would transgress them beware lest he transgress all humanity.
BOOK TWO
POETIC WISDOM
[PROLEGOMENA]
INTRODUCTION
361 We have said above in the Axioms [202] that all the histories of the
gentile nations have had fabulous beginnings, that among the Greeks (who
have given us all we know of gentile antiquity) the first sages were the the-
ological poets, and that the nature of everything born or made betrays the
crudeness of its origin. It is thus and not otherwise that we must conceive the
origins of poetic wisdom. And as for the great and sovereign esteem in which it
has been handed down to us, this has its origin in the two conceits mentioned
in the Axioms [125, 127], that of the nations on the one hand and that of the
scholars on the other. And it springs even more from the latter than from the
former. For just as Manetho, the Egyptian high priest, translated all the fabulous
history of Egypt into a sublime natural theology, as we have said in the Axioms
[222], so the Greek philosophers translated theirs into philosophy. And they
did so not merely for the reason that, as we have seen above in the Axioms [221 ],
to both alike the histories that had come down to them were disgusting, but for
the following five reasons as well.
362 The first was reverence for religion, for the gentile nations were
everywhere founded by fables on religion. The second was the grand effect
thence derived of this civil world, so wisely ordered that it could only be the
effect of a superhuman wisdom. The third was the occasions which, as we shall
see, these fables, assisted by the veneration of religion and the credit of such great
wisdom, gave the philosophers for instituting research and for meditating lofty
things in philosophy. The fourth was the ease with which they were thus en-
abled, as we shall also show farther on, to explain their sublime philosophical
meditations by means of the expressions happily left them by the poets. The
fifth and last, which is the sum of them all, is the confirmation of their own
meditations which the philosophers derived from the authority of religion and
the wisdom of the poets. Of these five reasons, the first two and the last contain
the praises of the divine wisdom which ordained this world of nations, and the
witness the philosophers bore to it even in their errors. The third and fourth are
deceptions permitted by divine providence, that thence there might arise philos-
98 THE NEW SCIENCE
ophers to understand and recognize it for what it truly is, an attribute of the
true God.
363 Throughout this book it will be shown that only so much as the poets
had first sensed of vulgar wisdom did the philosophers later understand of
esoteric wisdom; so that the former may be said to have been the sense and the
latter the intellect of the human race. What Aristotle said of the individual
man is therefore true of the race in general: Nihil cst in intcllectu quin prius
juerit in sensu. That is, the human mind does not understand anything of which
it has had no previous impression (which our modern metaphysicians call "oc-
casion") from the senses. Now the mind uses the intellect when, from something
it senses, it gathers something which does not fall under the senses; and this is
the proper meaning of the Latin verb intelligere.
[CHAPTER I]
WISDOM IN GENERAL
364 Now, before discussing poetic wisdom, it is necessary for us to see
what wisdom in general is. Wisdom is the faculty which commands all the dis-
ciplines by which we acquire all the sciences and arts that make up humanity.
Plato defines wisdom as "the perfecter of man." Man, in his proper being as
man, consists of mind and spirit, or, if we prefer, of intellect and will. It is the
function of wisdom to fulfill both these parts in man, the second by way of
the first, to the end that by a mind illuminated by knowledge of the highest
things the spirit may be led to choose the best. The highest things in the uni-
verse are those turned toward and conversant with God; the best are those which
look to the good of all mankind. The former are called divine things, the latter
human. True wisdom, then, should teach the knowledge of divine things in
order to conduct human things to the highest good. We believe that this was
the foundation on which Marcus Terentius Varro, who earned the title "most
learned of the Romans," erected his great work on things divine and human
[his Antiquitates], of which the injustice of time has unhappily bereft us. We
shall treat of these things in the present book so far as the weakness of our educa-
tion and the meagerness of our erudition permit.
365 Wisdom among the gentiles began with the Muse defined by Homer
in a golden passage of the Odyssey [VIII, 63] as "knowledge of good and evil,"
and later called divination. It was on the natural prohibition of this practice, as
something naturally denied to man, that God founded the true religion of the
Hebrews, from which our Christian religion arose, as set forth in one of the
Axioms [167] /The Muse must thus have been properly at first the science of
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 99
divining by auspices, and this, as stated in the Axioms [342], was the vulgar
wisdom of all nations, of which we shall have more to say presently. It consisted
in contemplating God under the attribute of his providence, whereby from
divinari his essence came to be called divinity. We shall see presently that the
theological poets, who certainly founded the humanity of Greece, were versed
in this wisdom, and this explains why the Latins called the judicial astrologers
"professors of wisdom." Wisdom was later attributed to men renowned for use-
ful counsels given to mankind, as in the case of the Seven Sages of Greece. The
attribution was afterwards extended to men who for the good of peoples and
nations wisely ordered and governed commonwealths. Still later the word wis-
dom came to mean knowledge of natural divine things; that is, metaphysics,
called for that reason divine science, which, seeking knowledge of man's mind
in God, and recognizing God as the source of all truth, must recognize him as
the regulator of all good. So that metaphysics must essentially work for the
good of the human race, whose preservation depends on the universal belief
in a provident divinity. It is perhaps for having demonstrated this providence
that Plato deserved to be called divine; and that which denies to God this great
attribute must be called stupidity rather than wisdom. Finally among the He-
brews, and thence among us Christians, wisdom was called the science of eternal
things revealed by God; a science which, among the Tuscans, considered as
knowledge of the true good and true evil, perhaps owed to that fact the first
name they gave it, "science in divinity."
366 We must therefore distinguish more truly than Varro did the three
kinds of theology. First, poetic theology, that of the theological poets, which
was the civil theology of all the gentile nations. Second, natural theology, that
of the metaphysicians. Third, our Christian theology, a mixture of civil and
natural with the loftiest revealed theology; all three united in the contemplation
of divine providence. (Our third kind takes the place of Varro's poetic the-
ology, which among the gentiles was the same as civil theology, though he dis-
tinguished it from both civil and natural theology because, sharing the vulgar
common error that the fables contained high mysteries of sublime philosophy,
he believed it to be a mixture of both.) Divine providence has so conducted hu-
man affairs that, starting from the poetic theology which regulated them by cer-
tain sensible signs believed to be divine counsels sent to men by the gods, and
by means of the natural theology which demonstrates providence by eternal
reasons which do not fall under the senses, the nations were disposed to receive
revealed theology in virtue of a supernatural faith, superior not only to the
senses but to human reason itself.
THE NEW SCIENCE
[CHAPTER II]
EXPOSITION AND DIVISION OF POETIC WISDOM
367 But because metaphysics is the sublime science which distributes
their determinate subject matters to all the so-called subaltern sciences; and be-
cause the wisdom of the ancients was that of the theological poets, who without
doubt were the first sages of the gentile world, as we have established in the
Axioms [199]; and because the origins of all things must by nature have been
crude: for all these reasons we must trace the beginnings of poetic wisdom to a
crude metaphysics. From this, as from a trunk, there branch out from one limb
logic, morals, economics and politics, all poetic; and from another physics, the
mother of their cosmography and hence of astronomy, which gives their cer-
tainty to its two daughters, chronology and geography, all likewise poetic. We
shall show clearly and distinctly how the founders of gentile humanity by
means of their natural theology (or metaphysics) imagined the gods; how by
means of their logic they invented languages; by morals, created heroes; by
economics, founded families, and by politics, cities; by their physics, established
the beginnings of things as all divine; by the particular physics of man, in a cer-
tain sense created themselves; by their cosmography, fashioned for themselves
a universe entirely of gods; by astronomy, carried the planets and constellations
from earth to heaven; by chronology, gave a beginning to [measured] times;
and how by geography the Greeks, for example, described the [whole] world
within their own Greece.
368 Thus our Science comes to be at once a history of the ideas, the
customs, and the deeds of mankind. From these three we shall derive the prin-
ciples of the history of human nature, which we shall show to be the principles
of universal history, which principles it seems hitherto to have lacked.
[CHAPTER III]
THE UNIVERSAL FLOOD AND THE GIANTS
369 The founders of gentile humanity must have been men of the races
of Ham, Japheth and Shem, which gradually, one after the other, renounced
that true religion of their common father Noah which alone in the family
state had beea able to hold them in human society by the bonds of matrimony
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 101
and hence of the families themselves. As a result of this renunciation, they dis-
solved their marriages and broke up their families by promiscuous intercourse,
and began roving wild through the great forest of the earth. The race of Ham
wandered through southern Asia, Egypt and the rest of Africa; that of Japheth
through northern Asia or Scythia, and thence through Europe; and that of
Shem through all middle Asia toward the east. By fleeing from the wild beasts
with which the great forest must have abounded, and by pursuing women, who
in that state must have been wild, indocile and shy, they became separated from
each other in their search for food and water. Mothers abandoned their chil-
dren, who in time must have come to grow up without ever hearing a human
voice, much less learning any human custom, and thus descended to a state
truly bestial and savage. Mothers, like beasts, must merely have nursed their
babies, let them wallow naked in their own filth, and abandoned them for good
as soon as they were weaned. And these children, who had to wallow in their
own filth, whose nitrous salts richly fertilized the fields, and who had to exert
themselves to penetrate the great forest, grown extremely dense from the flood,
would flex and contract their muscles in these exertions, and thus absorb nitrous
salts into their bodies in greater abundance. They would be quite without that
fear of gods, fathers and teachers which chills and benumbs even the most ex-
uberant in childhood. They must therefore have grown robust, vigorous, ex-
cessively big in brawn and bone, to the point of becoming giants. This upbring-
ing of theirs was even more savage than that to which, as noted above in the
Axioms [170], Caesar and Tacitus ascribe the gigantic stature of the ancient
Germans; from which was derived that of the Goths whom Procopius mentions,
and which was like that of the Patagonians supposed to exist today near the
strait of Magellan. Philosophers in physics have spoken much nonsense on this
subject, collected by Chassagnon, who wrote De gigantibus. Of such giants there
have been found and are still being found, for the most part in the mountains
(a circumstance with an important bearing on what we have to say below), great
skulls and bones of an unnatural size which is further exaggerated by vulgar
tradition for reasons of which we shall speak in their proper place.
370 Such giants were scattered over the earth after the flood. We have
seen them in the fabulous history of the Greeks, and the Latin philologians, with-
out being aware of it, have told us of their existence in the ancient history of
Italy, where they say that the most ancient peoples of Italy, the so-called
aborigines, claimed to be autochthones, which is as much as to say "sons of
Earth," which among the Greeks and Latins meant nobles. And in the fables
the Greeks quite properly called the sons of earth giants, and the Earth mother
of giants. The Greek term autochthones should be rendered in Latin indigenac,
that is, properly, those born of a land; thus the native gods of a people or na-
tion were called dii indigctcs, as if inde gcniti, or, as we should say more shortly
today, ingcniti. For the syllable de is one of the redundancies of the first lan-
guages of the peoples which we shall discuss later. Thus among the Latins we
102 THE NEW SCIENCE
find induperator for imperator, and in the Law of the Twelve Tables endoiacito
for iniicito, whence perhaps it came that armistices were called induciae, as if
iniiciac, because they must have been so called from iccre foedus, to make a pact
of peace. So, in the case in hand, from indigent was derived ingenui, whose first
and proper meaning was "noble" (whence the term artes ingcnuae, "noble
arts") but which finally came to mean "free" (though artes liberates kept the
meaning "noble arts"). For nobles alone, as will shortly be demonstrated, com-
posed the first cities, in which the plebeians were slaves or precursors of slaves.
371 The same Latin philologians observe that all the ancient peoples
were called aborigines, and sacred history tells us of whole peoples called cmim
and zomzommim, which Hebrew scholars take to mean giants, one of whom
was Nimrod; and the giants before the flood are described by Scripture as
"brave, famous and powerful men of the age." The Hebrews, on account of
their cleanly upbringing and their fear of God and of their fathers, continued to
be of the proper stature in which God had created Adam and Noah had begotten
his three sons; and it was perhaps in abomination of giantism that the Hebrews
had so many ceremonial laws pertaining to bodily cleanliness. The Romans pre-
served a great vestige of these laws in the public sacrifice intended to purge the
city of all the sins of the citizens, which was performed with water and fire.
Their solemn nuptials w6re also celebrated with water and fire, and participation
in these two things was even the mark of citizenship, the deprivation of which
was called mterdictum aqua et ignL The sacrifice with fire and water was called
lustrum, which came to mean a period of five years because that was the interval
between these sacrifices, much as among the Greeks an Olympiad meant a
period of four years. But lustrum also meant a den of wild beasts, and the verb
lustrari, "to seek out" or "to purge," must at first have meant to seek out these
dens and purge them of the beasts lurking within; whence the water required
for the sacrifice was called aqua lustralis. The Greeks began to count their years
from the burning of the Nemean forest by Hercules to clear it for sowing grain,
in commemoration of which, as we pointed out in the "Idea of the Work"
[3] and as we shall see fully later, he founded the Olympiads. The Romans, with
more discernment, began to count their years in lustra from the water of the
sacred ablutions, because civilization began with water, the need of which was
felt before that of fire, as appears from the formulas of marriage and the inter-
dict, in which aqua comes before igni. This is the origin of the sacred ablu-
tions which must precede sacrifices, a custom which was and is common to all
nations. It was by becoming imbued with this cleanliness of body and this fear
of gods and of fathers in both cases a fear we shall hnd amounting to terror
in the earliest times that the giants diminished to our normal stature. It was
perhaps for this reason that from politeia, which in Greek means "civil govern-
ment," was derived the Latin politus, "clean" or "neat."
372 This diminution of stature must have continued down to the human
period of the nations, as is demonstrated by the excessively large weapons of
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 103
the ancient heroes, which Augustus, according to Suetonius, preserved along
with the bones and skulls of the ancient giants in his museum. Thus, as stated
in the Axioms [172], the entire first world of men must be divided into two
kinds: the first, men of normal size, which includes the Hebrews only; the
second, giants, who were the founders of the gentile nations. Of the giants there
were in turn two kinds: the first, the sons of Earth, or nobles, from whom, as
being giants in the full sense of the term, the age of giants took its name, as we
have said (and it is these whom sacred history defines as "strong, famous and
powerful men of the age"); the second, less properly so called, those other giants
who were subjugated [by the former].
373 The time at which the founders of the gentile nations reached this
condition [of giantism] is fixed a century after the deluge for the race of Shem,
and two centuries for those of Japheth and Ham, as postulated above [62].
Below, presently, will be given the physical history of this matter [387], which,
though related to us in the Greek fables, has not hitherto been observed, and
which at the same time will give us a new physical history of the universal
flood [380].
[SECTION I]
[POETIC METAPHYSICS]
[CHAPTER I]
POETIC METAPHYSICS AS THE ORIGIN OF POETRY, IDOLATRY,
DIVINATION AND SACRIFICES
374 From these first men, stupid, insensate and horrible beasts, all the
philosophers and philologians should have begun their investigations of the
wisdom of the ancient gentiles; that is, from the giants in the proper sense in
which we have just taken them. (Father Boulduc in his De ecclesia ante Legem
says the scriptural names of the giants signify "pious, venerable and illustrious
men"; but this can be understood only of the noble giants who by divination
founded the gentile religions and gave the age of giants its name.) And they
should have begun with metaphysics, which seeks its proofs not in the external
world but within the modifications of the mind of him who meditates it. For,
as we have said above, since this world of nations has certainly been made by
men, it is within these modifications that its principles should have been sought.
And human nature, so far as it is like that of animals, carries with it this property,
that the senses are its sole way of knowing things.
375 Hence poetic wisdom, the first wisdom of the gentile world, must
have begun with a metaphysic not rational and abstract like that of learned
men now, but felt and imagined as that of these first men must have been, who,
without power of ratiocination, were all robust sense and vigorous imagination,
as established in the Axioms [185], This metaphysic was their poetry, a faculty
born with them (for they were furnished by nature with these senses and
imaginations); born of their ignorance of causes, for ignorance, the mother of
wonder, made everything wonderful to men who were ignorant of everything,
as noted in the Axioms [184]. Their poetry was at first divine, because they
imagined the causes of the things they felt and wondered at to be gods, as we
saw in the passage from Lactantius cited in the Axioms [188]. (This is now con-
firmed by the American Indians, who call gods all the things that surpass their
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 105
small understanding. We may add the ancient Germans dwelling about the
Arctic Ocean, of whom Tacitus tells that they spoke of hearing the Sun pass
at night from west to east through the sea, and affirmed that they saw the gods.
These very rude and simple nations help us to a much better understanding of
the founders of the gentile world with whom we are now concerned.) At the
same time they gave the things they wondered at substantial being after their
own ideas, just as children do, whom we see take inanimate things in their
hands and play with them and talk to them as though they were living persons,
as laid down in an axiom [186].
376 In such fashion the first men of the gentile nations, children of
nascent mankind as we have styled them in the Axioms [209], created things
according to their own ideas. But this creation was infinitely different from that
of God. For God, in his purest intelligence, knows things, and, by knowing
them, creates them; but they, in their robust ignorance, did it by virtue of a
wholly corporeal imagination. And because it was quite corporeal, they did it with
marvelous sublimity; a sublimity such and so great that it excessively perturbed
the very persons who by feigning did the creating, for which they were called
"poets," which is Greek for "makers." Now this is the threefold labor of great
poetry: (i) to invent sublime fables suited to the popular understanding, (2) to
perturb to excess, with a view to the end proposed: (3) to teach the vulgar to
act virtuously, as the poets have taught themselves; as will presently be shown.
Of this nature of human things there came an eternal property, expressed in a
noble phrase of Tacitus: that frightened men vainly "no sooner feign than they
believe" (fingunt simul creduntque [Annals V 10]).
377 Of such natures must have been the first founders of gentile hu-
manity when at last the sky fearfully rolled with thunder and flashed with
lightning, as could not but follow from the bursting upon the air for the first
time of an impression so violent. As we have postulated [62, 195], this occurred
a hundred years after the flood in Mesopotamia and two hundred after it
throughout the rest of the world; for it took that much time to reduce the earth
to such a state that, dry of the moisture of the universal flood, it could send up
dry exhalations or matter igniting in the air to produce lightning. Thereupon a
few giants, who must have been the most robust, and who were dispersed
through the forests on the mountain heights where the strongest beasts have
their dens, were frightened and astonished by the great effect whose cause they
did not know, and raised their eyes and became aware of the sky. And because
in such a case, as stated in the Axioms [180], the nature of the human mind
leads it to attribute its own nature to the effect, and because in that state their
nature was that of men all robust bodily strength, who expressed their very
violent passions by shouting and grumbling, they pictured the sky to themselves
as a great animated body, which in that aspect they called Jove, the first god of
the so-called gentes maiores, who by the whistling of his bolts and the noise of
his thunder was attempting to tell them something, And thus they began to
io6 THE NEW SCIENCE
exercise that natural curiosity which is the daughter of ignorance and the mother
of knowledge, and which, opening the mind of man, gives birth to wonder, as
we have put it above in the Axioms [189]. This characteristic still persists in the
vulgar, who, when they see a comet or sun-dog or some other extraordinary
thing in nature, and particularly in the countenance of the sky, at once turn
curious and anxiously inquire what it means, as we have it in an axiom [189],
When they wonder at the prodigious effects of the magnet on iron, even in this
age of minds enlightened and made erudite by philosophy, they come out with
this: that the magnet has an occult sympathy for the iron; and they make of all
nature a vast animate body which feels passions and effects, as we have noted in
the Axioms [180].
378 But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses,
even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our
languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were
spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count
and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this
mistress called "Sympathetic Nature." Men shape the phrase with their lips but
have nothing in their minds; for what they have in mind is falsehood, which is
nothing; and their imagination no longer avails to form a vast false image. It is
equally beyond our power .to enter into the vast imagination of those first men,
whose minds were not in the least abstract, refined, or spiritualized, because they
were entirely immersed in the senses, buffeted by the passions, buried in the
body. That is why we said above [338] that we can scarcely understand, still
less imagine, how those first men thought who founded gentile humanity.
379 In this fashion the first theological poets created the first divine
fable, the greatest they ever created: that of Jove, king and father of men and
gods, in the act of hurling the lightning bolt; an image so popular, disturbing
and instructive that its creators themselves believed in it, and feared, revered
and worshiped it in frightful religions which we shall shortly describe. And
by that trait of the human mind we found noticed by Tacitus in the Axioms
[183], these men attributed to Jove all they saw, imagined or even did them-
selves; and to all of the universe that came within their scope, to all its parts,
they assigned the being of animate substance. This is the civil history of the
expression "all things are full of Jove" (lovis omnia plena), by which Plato
understood the ether which penetrates and fills the universe. But for the the-
ological poets, as will shortly be seen, Jove was no higher than the mountain
peaks. The first men, who spoke by signs, naturally believed that lightning bolts
and thunder claps were signs made to them by Jove; whence from nuo, to make
a sign, came numen, the divine will, by an idea more than sublime and worthy
to express the divine majesty. They believed that Jove commanded by signs,
that such signs were real words, and that nature was the language of Jove. The
science of this language the gentiles universally believed to be divination, which
by the Greeks was called theology, meaning the science of the language of the
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 107
gods. Thus Jove acquired the fearful kingdom of the lightning and became the
king of men and gods; and he acquired the two titles, that of best (optimus)
in the sense of strongest (fortissimus) (as by a reverse process fortis meant in
early Latin what bonus did in late), and that of greatest (maximus) from his
vast body, the sky itself. For the first great mercy he showed mankind by not
destroying it with his bolts, he received the title Soter or savior. (This is the
first of the three principles we have taken for our Science.) And for having put
an end to the feral wandering of these few giants, so that they became the
princes of the gcntes, he received the epithet Stator, stayer or establisher. The
Latin philologians explain this epithet too narrowly from Jove, invoked by
Romulus, having stopped the Romans in their flight from the battle with the
Sabines.
380 Thus the many Joves the philologians wonder at are so many physical
histories preserved for us by the fables, which prove the universality of the
flood, as we premised in the Axioms [194]. For every gentile nation had its Jove,
and the Egyptians had the conceit to say that their Jove Ammon was the most
ancient of them all, as was said above in the Axioms [62].
381 Thus, in accordance with what has been said in the Axioms [209]
about the principles of the poetic characters, Jove was born naturally in poetry
as a divine character or imaginative universal, to which everything having to do
with the auspices was referred by all the ancient gentile nations, which must
therefore all have been poetic by nature. Their poetic wisdom began with this
poetic metaphysics, which contemplated God by the attribute of his providence;
and they were called theological poets, or sages who understood the language of
the gods expressed in the auspices of Jove; and were properly called divine in the
sense of diviners, from divtnan, to "divine" or "predict." Their science was
called Muse, defined above [365] by Homer as the knowledge of good and evil;
that is, divination, on the prohibition of which God ordained his true religion
for Adam, as was said in the Axioms [167]. Because they were versed in this
mystic theology, the Greek poets, who explained the divine mysteries of the
auspices and oracles, were called mystae, which Horace learnedly translates
"interpreters of the gods." Every gentile nation had its own sybil versed in this
science, and we find mention of twelve of them. Sybils and oracles are the most
ancient things of the gentile world.
382 All the things here discussed agree with that golden passage of
Eusebius [i.e. Lactantius] referred to in the Axioms [188], where he speaks of
the origins of idolatry: that the first people, simple and rough, invented the gods
"from terror of present power." Thus it was fear which created gods in the
world; but, as was remarked in the Axioms [191], not fear awakened in men
by other men, but fear awakened in men by themselves. Along with this origin
of idolatry is demonstrated likewise the origin of divination, which was brought
into the world at the same birth. The origins of these two were followed by that
of the sacrifices made to procure or rightly understand the auspices.
io8 THE NEW SCIENCE
383 That such was the origin of poetry is finally confirmed by this eternal
property of it: that its proper material is the credible impossibility. It is impossible
that bodies should be minds, yet it was believed that the thundering sky was Jove.
And nothing is dearer to poets than singing the marvels wrought by sorceresses
by means of incantations. All this is to be explained by a hidden sense the na-
tions have of the omnipotence of God. From this sense springs another by
which all, peoples are naturally led to do infinite honors to divinity. In this man-
ner the poets founded religions among the gentiles.
384 All that has been so far said here upsets all the theories of the origin
of poetry from Plato and Aristotle down to Patrizzi, Scahger and Castelvetro.
For it has been shown that it was deficiency of human reasoning power that
gave rise to poetry so sublime that the philosophies which came afterwards, the
arts of poetry and of criticism, have produced none equal or better, and have
even prevented its production. Hence it is Homer's privilege to be, of all the
sublime, that is, the heroic poets, the first in the order of merit as well as in that
of age. This discovery of the origins of poetry does away with the opinion of the
matchless wisdom of the ancients, so ardently sought after from Plato to Bacon's
DC sapientia veterum. For the wisdom of the ancients was the vulgar wisdom of
the lawgivers who founded the human race, not the esoteric wisdom of great
and rare philosophers. Whence it will be found, as it has been in the case of Jove,
that all the mystic meanings of lofty philosophy attributed by the learned to the
Greek fables and the Egyptian hieroglyphics are as impertinent as the historical
meanings they both must have had are natural.
[CHAPTER II]
COROLLARIES CONCERNING THE PRINCIPAL ASPECTS OF THIS SCIENCE
385 From what has been said up to this point it is concluded that divine
providence, apprehended by such human sense as could have been possessed by
rough, wild and savage men who in despair of nature's succors desired some-
thing superior to nature to save them (which is the first principle on which we
established the method of this Science), permitted them to be deceived into
fearing the false divinity of Jove because he could strike them with lightning.
Thus, through the thick clouds of those first tempests, intermittently lit by
those flashes, they made out this great truth: that divine providence watches
over the welfare of all mankind. So that this Science becomes, in this principal
aspect a rational civil theology of divine providence, which began in the vulgar
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 109
wisdom of the lawgivers who founded the nations by contemplating God under
the attribute of providence, and which is completed by the esoteric wisdom of
the philosophers who give a rational demonstration of it in their natural theology.
II
386 Here begins also a philosophy of authority, a second principal aspect
of this Science, taking the word authority in its original meaning of property.
The word is always used in this sense in the Law of the Twelve Tables, and
the term auctorcs was accordingly applied to those from whom we derive title
to property. Auctor certainly comes from autos (-proprius or suus ipsius)\
many scholars write autor and autoritas, leaving out the aspirate.
387 Authority was at first divine; the authority by which divinity ap-
propriated to itself the few giants we have spoken of, by properly casting them
into the depths and recesses of the caves under the mountains. This is the iron
ring by which the giants, dispersed upon the mountains, were kept chained to
the earth by fear of the sky and of Jove, wherever they happened to be when
the sky first thundered. Such were Tityus and Prometheus, chained to a high
rock with their hearts being devoured by an eagle, that is, by the religion of
Jove's auspices. Their being rendered immobile by fear was expressed by the
Latins in the heroic phrase terrore depxi, and the artists depict them chained
hand and foot with such links upon the mountains. Of these links was formed
the great chain which Dionysius Longinus admires as the highest sublimity in
all the Homeric fables. Concerning this chain, Jove, to prove that he is king of
men and gods, asserts that if all the gods and men were to take hold of one end,
he alone at the other end would be able to drag them all. The Stoics would
have the chain represent the eternal series of causes by which their Fate holds
the world girdled and bound, but let them look out lest they be entangled in it
themselves, because the dragging of men and gods by this chain depends on the
will of Jove, yet they would have Jove subject to Fate.
388 Upon this divine authority followed human authority in the full
philosophic sense of the term, that is, the property of human nature which not
even God can take from man without destroying him. It is in this sense that
Terence speaks of voluptates proprias deorum, meaning that the felicity of God
does not depend on others; and Horace of propriam virtutis laurum, meaning
that the triumph of virtue cannot be taken away by envy; and Caesar of propriam
vlctoriam, which Denis Petau erroneously considers bad Latin, whereas it is
exceedingly elegant Latin for a victory which could not be snatched from his
hands by the enemy. This authority is the free use of the will, the intellect on
the other hand being a passive power subject to truth. For from this first point
of all human things, men began to exercise the freedom of the human will to
hold in check the motions of the body, either to subdue them entirely or to
give them better direction (this being the impulse proper to free agents, as we
have said above in the Method [340]). Hence it was that the giants gave up the
no THE NEW SCIENCE
bestial custom of wandering through the great forest of the earth and habituated
themselves to the quite contrary custom of remaining settled and hidden for a
long period in their caves.
389 This authority of human nature was followed by the authority of
natural law; for, having occupied and remained settled for a long time in the
places where they chanced to find themselves at the time of the first thunderbolts,
they became lords of them by occupation and long possession, the source of all
dominion in the world. These are those "few whom just Jupiter loved" (pattci
quos aequus amavit / luplter) [Vergil, Aeneid VI 129 f.], whom the philos-
ophers later metamorphosed into men favored by God with natural aptitudes for
science and virtue. But the historical significance of this phrase is that in the
recesses and depths [of the caves] they became the princes of the so-called gentes
maiorcs, who counted Jove the first god, as noted in the Axioms [317]. As will
be shown later, these were the ancient noble houses, branching out into many
families, of which the first kingdoms and the first cities were composed. Their
memory was preserved in those fine heroic Latin phrases: condere gentes, con-
dere regna, condere urbes; jundare gentes, jundare regna, jundare urbes.
390 This philosophy of authority follows the rational civil theology of
providence because by means of the former's theological proofs the latter with its
philosophical ones makes clear and distinct the philological ones (all three kinds
of proofs being enumerated in the Method); and with reference to the things of
the most obscure antiquity of the nations it reduces to certitude the human will,
which is by its nature most uncertain, as noted in the Axioms [141]. Which is
as much as to say that it reduces philology to the form of a science.
Ill
391 The third principal aspect is a history of human ideas. These, as we
have just seen, began with divine ideas by way of contemplation of the heavens
with the bodily eyes. Thus in their science of augury the Romans used the verb
contemplari for observing the parts of the sky whence the auguries came or the
auspices were taken. These regions, marked out by the augurs with their wands,
were called "temples of the sky" (tern f la coeli), whence must have come to the
Greeks their first theoremata and mathemata, things divine or sublime to con-
template, which eventuated in metaphysical and mathematical abstractions. This
is the civil history of the saying "From Jove the Muse began" (A love principium
musae [Vergil, Bucohca, III 60]). For we have just seen that Jove's bolts pro-
duced the first muse, which Homer defines as "knowledge of good and evil."
At this point it was all too easy for the philosophers later to intrude the dictum
that the beginning of wisdom is piety. The first muse must have been Urania,
who contemplated the heavens to take the auguries. Later she came to stand for
astronomy, as will presently be shown. Just as poetic metaphysics was above
divided into all fts subordinate sciences, each sharing the poetic nature of their
mother, so this history of ideas will present the rough origins both of the prac-
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM in
tical sciences in use among the nations and of the speculative sciences which,
now refined, are celebrated by the learned.
IV
392 The fourth aspect is a philosophical criticism which grows out of
the aforesaid history of ideas. Such a criticism will render true judgment upon
the founders of the nations, which must have taken well over a thousand years
to produce the writers who are the subjects of philological criticism. Beginning
with Jove, our philosophical criticism will give us a natural theogony or genera-
tion of the gods as it took form naturally in the minds of the founders of the
gentile world, who were by nature theological poets. The twelve gods of the
so-called gentes maiorcs, the ideas of whom were imagined by them from time
to time on certain occasions of human necessity or utility, are assigned to
twelve short epochs, into which we divide the period in which the fables were
born. Thus this natural theogony will give us a rational chronology of poetic
history for at least nine hundred years before vulgar history (which came after
the heroic period) had its first beginnings.
V
393 The fifth aspect is an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the
histories of all nations. Wherever, emerging from savage, fierce and bestial
times, men begin to domesticate themselves by religion, they begin, proceed and
end by those stages which are investigated in this second book, to be encountered
again in the fourth book, where we treat the course the nations run, and in the
fifth, where we treat the recurrence of human things.
VI
394 The sixth is a system of the natural law of nations. The three princes
of this doctrine, Hugo Grotius, John Selden and Samuel Pufendorf, should have
taken their start, by one of the Axioms above laid down [314], from the begin-
nings of the nations, where their subject matter begins. But al) three of them
err together in this respect, by beginning in the middle; that is, with the latest
times of the civilized nations (and thus of men enlightened by fully developed
natural reason) from which the philosophers emerged and rose to meditation
of a perfect idea of justice.
395 First Grotius, just because of the great love he bears the truth, sets
aside divine providence and professes that his system will stand even if all knowl-
edge of God be left out of account. Thus all the reproofs which in a great num-
ber of matters he brings against the Roman jurists, do not touch them at all,
since they took divine providence for their first principle and proposed to treat
of the natural law of nations, not that of the philosophers and moral theologians.
396 Then Selden assumes providence, but without paying any attention
to the inhospitableness of the first peoples, or to the division the people of God
ri2 THE NEW SCIENCE
made of the whole world of nations at that time into Hebrews and gentiles. Or
to the fact that, since the Hebrews had lost sight of their natural law during
their slavery in Egypt, God himself must have reestablished it for them by the
law he gave Moses on Sinai. Or to the further fact that God in his law forbids
even thoughts that are less than just, with which no mortal lawgiver has ever
troubled himself. Or to the bestial origins here discussed of all the gentile na-
tions. And although he pretends that the Jews presently taught their natural
law to the gentiles, he is entirely unable to prove it, opposed as he is by the
magnanimous confession of Josephus seconded by the grave reflection of Lac-
tantius cited above, and by the hostility with which, as we have also observed
above, the Jews have always regarded the gentiles, and which they preserve
even now when dispersed among all the nations.
397 And finally Pufendorf begins with an Epicurean hypothesis, sup-
posing man to have been cast into this world without any help or care from
God. Reproved for this, he defends himself in a special dissertation, but, because
he does not admit providence as his first principle, he cannot even begin to
speak of law, as we have heard Cicero tell Atticus the Epicurean in his dialogue
De legibus.
398 For all these reasons, we begin our treatment of law the Latin for
which is ius t contraction of the ancient lous at this most ancient point of all
times, at the moment when the idea of Jove was born in the minds of the
founders of the nations. To the Latin derivation of ius from lous there is a strik-
ing parallel in Greek; for, as by a happy chance we find Plato observing in the
Cratylus, the Greeks called law at first diaion. This means "pervasive" or "en-
during" by a philosophical etymology intruded by Plato himself, whose erudite
mythology makes Jove the ether which penetrates and flows through all things.
But the historical derivation of dia'ton is from Jove, whom the Greeks called
Dlos, whence the Latin expression sub dio, which, equally with sub love, means
"under the open sky." For the sake of euphony, diaion came later to be pro-
nounced difoion. This then is our point of departure for the discussion of law,
which was originally divine, in the proper sense expressed by divination, the
science of Jove's auspices, which were the divine things by which the nations
regulated all human things. These two classes of things taken together make up
the adequate subject matter of jurisprudence. Thus our treatment of natural
law begins with the idea of divine providence, in the same birth with which
was born the idea of law. For law began naturally to be observed, in the man-
ner examined above, by the founders of the gcntcs properly so called, those of
the most ancient order, which were called gentes maiores, whose first god was
Jove.
VII
399 Thi seventh and last of the principal aspects of this Science is that
of the principles of universal history. It begins with this first moment of all
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 113
human things of the gentile world, with the first of the three ages of the world
which the Egyptians said had elapsed before them; namely, the age of the gods,
in which Heaven began to reign on earth and to bestow great benefits on men,
as noted in the Axioms [64], This is the golden age of the Greeks, in which the
gods consorted with men on earth, as we have seen Jove begin to do. Starting
with this first age of the world, the Greek poets in their fables have faithfully
narrated the universal flood and the existence of giants in nature, and thus have
truly narrated the beginnings of profane universal history. Yet [this history has
hitherto lacked beginning for the following reasons.] Later men were unable to
enter into the imaginations of the first men who founded the gentile world,
which made them think they saw the gods. The verb atterrare was no longer
understood in its proper sense, "to send underground/' The giants who lived
hidden in the caves under the mountains were metamorphosed in the later
traditions of overcredulous peoples, and were supposed to have piled Olympus,
Pelion and Ossa one on top of the other to drive the gods from heaven. Actually,
the first impious giants not only did not fight the gods but were not even aware
of them until Jove hurled his bolts. And whereas heaven was raised to an enor-
mous height by the much more developed minds of later Greeks, to the first
giants it was but the mountain summits, as we shall presently show. The fable
above mentioned [of the giants storming heaven] must have been invented
after Homer and fastened on him by interpolation in the Odyssey [XI 313 ff.];
for in his time merely to shake Olympus would have sufficed to dislodge the gods,
since in the Iliad he always represents them as residing on the summit of Mount
Olympus. For all these reasons profane universal history has hitherto lacked its
beginning, and, for lack of the rational chronology of poetic history, it has lacked
its continuity as well.
[SECTION II]
[POETIC LOGIC]
[CHAPTER I]
POETIC LOGIC
400 That which is metaphysics insofar as it contemplates things in all
the forms of their being, is logic insofar as it considers things in all the forms by
which they may be signified. Accordingly, as poetry has been considered by us
above as a poetic metaphysics in which the theological poets imagined bodies
to be for the most part divine substances, so now that same poetry is considered
as poetic logic, by which it signifies them.
401 The word logic comes from logos, whose first and proper meaning
was jabula, "fable," carried over into Italian as favella, "speech." In Greek the
fable was also called mythos, "myth," whence comes the Latin mutus, "mute."
For speech was born in mute times as mental [or sign] language, which Strabo
in a golden passage says existed before vocal or articulate [language]; whence
logos means both "word" and "idea." It was fitting that the matter should be
so ordered by divine providence in religious times, for it is an eternal property
of religions that they attach more importance to meditation than to speech.
Thus, as stated in the Axioms [225], the first language in the first mute times
of the nations must have begun with signs, whether gestures or physical objects,
which had natural relations to the ideas [to be expressed]. For this reason
logos or "word" meant also "deed" to the Hebrews and "thing" to the Greeks,
as Thomas Gataker observes in his De instrument! stylo. Similarly, mythos
came to be defined for us as vera narratio or "true speech," the natural speech
which first Plato and then lamblichus said had been spoken in the world at one
time. But this was mere conjecture on their part, as we saw in the Axioms [227],
and Plato's effort to recover this speech in the Cratylus was therefore vain, and
he was criticized for it by Aristotle and Galen. For that first language, spoken
by the theological poets, was not a language in accord with the nature of the
things it dealt with (as must have been the sacred language invented by Adam,
BOOK II, POETIC WISDOM 115
to whom God granted divine onomathesia, the giving of names to things accord-
ing to the nature of each), but was a fantastic speech making use of physical
substances endowed with life and most of them imagined to be divine.
402 This is the way in which the theological poets apprehended Jove,
Cybele or Berecynthia, and Neptune, for examples, and, at first mutely point-
ing, explained them as substances of the sky, the earth and the sea, which they
imagined to be animate divinities and were therefore true to their senses in be-
lieving them to be gods. By means of these three divinities, in accordance with
what we have said above concerning poetic characters, they explained every-
thing appertaining to the sky, the earth and the sea. And similarly by means of
the other divinities they signified the other kinds of things appertaining to
each, denoting all flowers for instance by Flora, and all fruits by Pomona. We
nowadays reverse this practice in respect of spiritual things, such as the faculties
of the human mind, the passions, virtues, vices, sciences and arts; for the most
part the ideas we form of them are so many feminine personifications, to which
we refer all the causes, properties and effects that severally appertain to them.
For when we wish to give utterance to our understanding of spiritual things, we
must seek aid from our imagination to explain them and, like painters, form
human images of them. But these theological poets, unable to make use of the
understanding, did the opposite and more sublime thing: they attributed senses
and passions, as we saw not long since, to bodies, and to bodies as vast as sky,
sea and earth. Later, as these vast imaginations shrank and the power of ab-
straction grew, the same objects were apprehended by diminutive signs.
Metonymy erected into dogma the prevailing ignorance of these origins of human
things, which have remained buried until now. Jove becomes so small and light
that he is flown about by an eagle. Neptune rides the waves in a fragile chariot.
And Cybele rides seated on a lion.
403 Thus the mythologies, as their name indicates, must have been the
proper languages of the fables; the fables being imaginative class-concepts, as
we have shown, the mythologies must have been the allegories corresponding
to them. Allegory, as observed in the Axioms [210], is defined as diver silo quium
insofar as, by identity not of proportion but (to speak scholastically) of predica-
bility, allegories signify the diverse species or the diverse individuals comprised
under these genera. So that they must have a univocal signification connoting a
quality common to all their species and individuals (as Achilles connotes an
idea of valor common to all strong men, or Ulysses an idea of prudence common
to all wise men); such that these allegories must be the etymologies of the poetic
languages, which would make their origins all univocal, whereas those of the
vulgar languages arc more often analogous. We also have the definition of the
word etymology itself as meaning veriloquium, just as fable was defined as vcra
narratio.
n6 THE NEW SCIENCE
[CHAPTER II]
COROLLARIES CONCERNING POETIC TROPES,
MONSTERS AND METAMORPHOSES
I
404 All the first tropes are corollaries of this poetic logic. The most
luminous and therefore the most necessary and frequent is metaphor. It is most
praised when it gives sense and passion to insensate things, in accordance with
the metaphysics above discussed, by which the first poets attributed to bodies
the being of animate substances, with capacities measured by their own, namely
sense and passion, and in this way made fables of them. Thus every metaphor so
formed is a fable in brief. This gives a basis for judging the time when meta-
phors made their appearance in the languages. All the metaphors conveyed by
likenesses taken from bodies to signify the operations of abstract minds must
date from times when philosophies were taking shape. The proof of this is that
in every language the terms needed for the refined arts and recondite sciences are
of rustic origin.
405 It is noteworthy that in all languages the greater part of the expres-
sions relating to inanimate things are formed by metaphor from the human body
and its parts and from the human senses and passions. Thus, head for top or
beginning; eyes for the looped heads of screws and for windows letting light
into houses; mouth for any opening; lip for the rim of a vase or of anything
else; the tooth of a plow, a rake, a saw, a comb; beard for rootlets; the mouth
of a river; a neck of land; handful for a small number; heart for center (the
Latins used umbilicus, "navel," in this sense); foot for end; the flesh of fruits; a
vein of water, rock or mineral; the blood of grapes for wine; the bowels of the
earth. 1 Heaven or the sea smiles; the wind whistles; the waves murmur; a body
groans under a great weight. The farmers of Latium used to say the fields were
thirsty, bore fruit, were swollen with grain; and our own rustics speak of plants
making love, vines going mad, resinous trees weeping. Innumerable other ex-
amples could be collected from all languages. All of which is a consequence of
our axiom [120] that man in his ignorance makes himself the rule of the uni-
verse, for in the examples cited he has made of himself an entire world. So that,
as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding
them (homo intelligendo fit omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that
man becomes alj things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendo fit
1 Several of Vico's examples for which there are no English equivalents are here omitted.
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 117
omma)\ and perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for when
man understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does
not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by trans-
forming himself into them.
II
406 In such a logic, sprung from such a metaphysics, the first poets must
have given names to things from the most particular and the most sensible ideas.
Such ideas are the sources, respectively, of synecdoche and metonymy. Metonymy
of agent for act resulted from the fact that names for agents were commoner
than names for acts. Metonymy of subject for form and accident was due to the
fact that, as we have said in the Axioms [209], they did not know how to ab-
stract forms and qualities from subjects. Certainly metonymy of cause for effect
produced in each case a little fable, in which the cause was imagined as a woman
clothed with her effects: ugly Poverty, sad Old Age, pale Death.
Ill
407 Synecdoche developed into metaphor as particulars were elevated into
universals or parts united with the other parts together with which they make
up their wholes. Thus the term "mortals" was originally and properly applied
only to men, as the only beings whose mortality there was any occasion to
notice. The use of "head' for man or person, so frequent in vulgar Latin, was
due to the fact that in the forests only the head of a man could be seen from a
distance. The word "man" itself is abstract, comprehending as in a philosophic
genus the body and all its parts, the mind and all its faculties, the spirit and all
its dispositions. In the same way, ttgnum and culmen, "log" and "top," came to
be used with entire propriety when thatching was the practice for rafter and
thatch; and later, with the adornment of cities, they signified all the materials
and trim of a building. Again, tectum, "roof," came to mean a whole house
because in the first times a covering sufficed for a house. Similarly, puppis,
"poop," for a ship, because it was the highest part and therefore the first to be
seen by those on shore; as in the returned barbarian times a ship was called a
sail. Similarly, mucro, "point," for sword, because it is an abstract word and as
in a genus comprehends pummel, hilt, edge and point; it was the point they felt
which aroused their fear. Similarly, the material for the formed whole, as iron
for sword, because they did not know how to abstract the form from the mate-
rial. That bit of synecdoche and metonymy, Tertia messis erat, "it was the third
harvest," was doubtless born of a natural necessity, for it took more than a thou-
sand years for the astronomical term "year" to arise among the nations; and
even now the Florentine peasantry say "we have reaped so many times" when
they mean "so many years." And that knot of two synecdoches and a metonymy,
Post aliquot, mca regna vidcns, mirabor, aristas? ("After a few harvests shall I
wonder at seeing my kingdoms?"), betrays only too well the poverty of cxprcs-
ii8 THE NEW SCIENCE
sion of the first rustic times, in which the phrase "so many ears of wheat" even
more particular than harvests was used for "so many years." And because of
the excessive poverty of the expression, the grammarians have assumed an ex-
cess of art behind it.
IV
408 Irony certainly could not have begun until the period of reflection,
because it is fashioned of falsehood by dint of a reflection which wears the
mask of truth. Here emerges a great principle of human things, confirming the
origin of poetry disclosed in this work: that since the first men of the gentile
world had the simplicity of children, who are truthful by nature, the first fables
could not feign anything false; they must therefore have been, as they have been
defined above, true narrations.
409 From all this it follows that all the tropes (and they arc all reducible
to the four types above discussed), which have hitherto been considered ingenious
inventions of writers, were necessary modes of expression of all the first poetic
nations, and had originally their full native propriety. But these expressions of
the first nations later became figurative when, with the further development of
the human mind, words were invented which signified abstract forms or genera
comprising their species or relating parts with their wholes. And here begins the
overthrow of two common errors of the grammarians: that prose speech is
proper speech, and poetic speech improper; and that prose speech came first,
and afterwards speech in verse.
VI
410 Poetic monsters and metamorphoses arose from a necessity of this
first human nature, its inability, as shown in the Axioms [209], to abstract forms
or properties from subjects. By their logic they had to put subjects together in
order to put their forms together, or to destroy a subject in order to separate its
primary form from the contrary form which had been imposed upon it. Such
a putting together of ideas created the poetic monsters. In Roman law, as
Antoine Favre observes in his lurisprudentiac papinianeac scientia, children
born of prostitutes are called monsters because they have the nature of men to-
gether with the bestial characteristic of having been born of vagabonds or of
casual unions. Of such sort we shall find those monsters to have been (children
born of noble women without benefit of solemn nuptials) whom the Law of the
Twelve Tables commanded to be thrown into the Tiber.
VII
411 The* distinguishing of ideas produced metamorphoses. Among other
examples preserved by ancient jurisprudence is the heroic Latin phrase fundum
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 119
fieri, used in place of autorcm fieri; the explanation being that, as the ground
supports the farm or soil and that which is sown, planted or built thereon, so
the approver supports the act, which without his approbation would fail; and he
does this by quitting the form of a being moving at will, which he is, and taking
on the contrary form of a stable thing.
[CHAPTER III]
COROLLARIES CONCERNING SPEECH BY POETIC CHARACTERS
AMONG THE FIRST NATIONS
412 The poetic speech which our poetic logic has helped us to under-
stand continued for a long time into the historic period, much as great and
rapid rivers continue far into the sea, keeping sweet the waters borne on by the
force of their flow. We have cited in the Axioms [207] the statement of
lambiichus that the Egyptians attributed to Hermes Trismegistus all their in-
ventions useful to human life. And we confirmed this by another axiom [206]:
that "children, by the ideas and names of the men, women and objects they have
seen first, afterwards apprehend and name all the men, women and objects
which have any resemblance or relation with the first." This we said was the
great natural source of the poetic characters, with which the first peoples nat-
urally thought and spoke. We also remarked in the Axioms [207-209] that, if
lambiichus had reflected upon this nature of human things, bringing into rela-
tion with it the habit of the ancient Egyptians which he himself reports, he
would certainly not have injected into the mysteries of the vulgar wisdom of
the Egyptians the sublime mysteries of his own Platonic wisdom.
413 Now in view of this characteristic of children and this habit of the
first Egyptians, we assert that poetic speech, in virtue of the poetic characters
it employs, can yield many important discoveries concerning antiquity.
I
414 Solon must have been a sage of vulgar wisdom, party leader of the
plebs in the first times of the aristocratic commonwealth at Athens. This fact
was indeed preserved by Greek history where it narrates that at first Athens was
held by the optimates. In this work we shall show that such was universally
the case in all the heroic commonwealths. The heroes or nobles, by a certain
nature of theirs which they believed to be of divine origin, were led to say that
the gods belonged to them, and consequently that the auspices of the gods were
theirs also. By means of the auspices they kept within their own orders all the
public and private rights of the heroic cities. To the plebeians, whom they be-
120 THE NEW SCIENCE
lieved to be of best origin and consequently men without gods and hence
without auspices, they conceded only the use of natural liberty. (This is a great
principle of things that are discussed through almost the whole of the present
work.) Solon, however, had admonished the plebeians to reflect upon them-
selves and to realize that they were of like human nature with the nobles and
should therefore be made equal with them in civil rights. Unless, indeed, Solon
was [a poetic character for] the Athenian plebeians themselves, considered under
this aspect [of knowing themselves and demanding their rights].
415 The ancient Romans must also have had such a Solon among them.
For the plebeians in the heroic struggles with the nobles, as ancient Roman his-
tory openly tells us, kept saying that the fathers of whom Romulus had com-
posed the Senate (and from whom these patricians were descended) non esse
caelo demissos; that is, that they did not have that divine origin of which they
boasted, and that Jove was equal [just] to all. This is the civil history of the ex-
pression, lupiter omnibus aequus, into which the learned later read the tenet
that all minds are equal and that the differences they take on arise from differ-
ences in the organization of their bodies and in their civil education. By this
reflection the Roman plebeians began to achieve equality with the patricians in
civil liberty, until they entirely changed the Roman commonwealth from an
aristocratic to a popular form. We proposed this as a hypothesis in the Notes on
the Chronological Table [104], in a theoretical discussion of the Pubhlian law;
and we shall show that it occurred in fact not only in the Roman but in all the
other ancient commonwealths. Both by reasons and by authority we shall demon-
strate that the plebeians of the peoples universally, beginning with Solon's re-
flection, changed the commonwealths from aristocratic to popular.
416 Hence Solon was made the author of that celebrated saying, "Know
thyself," which, because of the great civil utility it had had for the Athenian
people, was inscribed in all the public places of the city. Later the learned
preferred to regard it as having been intended for what it is, a great counsel re-
specting metaphysical and moral things, and because of it Solon was reputed a
sage in esoteric wisdom and made prince of the Seven Sages of Greece, In this
way, because from this reflection there sprang up at Athens all the orders and
laws that shape a democratic commonwealth, and because of the first peoples'
habit of thinking in poetic characters, these orders and laws were all attributed
by the Athenians to Solon, just as, by the Egyptians, all inventions useful to
human civil life were attributed to Hermes Trismegistus.
II
417 In the same way all the laws concerning the orders must have been
attributed to Romulus.
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 121
III
418 And to Numa, as many concerning sacred things and divine cere-
monies, for which Roman religion was later conspicuous in its time of greatest
pomp.
IV
419 To Tullus Hostilius, all the laws and orders of military discipline.
V
420 To Servius Tullius, the census [tax] which is the basis of democratic
commonwealths, and other laws in great number having to do with popular
liberty, so that he was acclaimed by Tacitus as praecipuus sanctor legum, "chief
ordainer of laws." For, as we shall show, the census was the basis in aristocratic
commonwealths on which the plebeians obtained from the nobles the bonitary
ownership of the fields, which gave them occasion later for creating the tribunes
of the plebs to defend for them this part of natural liberty, and the tribunes
gradually led them to the attainment of full civil liberty. Thus the census of
Servius Tuliius, by affording the occasions and starting-points, developed into
the census which was the basis of the Roman popular commonwealth. This was
discussed by way of hypothesis in the notes on the Publilian law [111-113], and
will later be shown to be true in fact.
VI
421 To Tarqumius Priscus, all the ensigns and devices with which the
majesty of the Roman empire was later resplendent in the most illustrious times
of Rome.
VII
422 In the same way there must have been interpolated in the Twelve
Tables very many laws which will be shown to have been enacted in later times.
And since (as was fully demonstrated in our Principles of Universal Law)
the law of quiritary ownership when it was extended by the nobles to the
plebeians was the first law to be inscribed on a public tablet (the sole purpose
for which the decemvirs were created), all the laws making for equal liberty
which were later inscribed on public tablets were attributed to the decemvirs be-
cause of their aspect of popular liberty. Take as a test case Greek luxury in the
matter of funerals. Since the decemvirs would not have taught it to the Romans
by prohibiting it, the prohibition must have come after the Romans had adopted
it. But that cannot have been until after the wars with the Tarentines and with
Pyrrhus, in which their acquaintance with the Greeks began. This explains the
fact observed by Cicero that this law translated into Latin the very words in
which it had been conceived in Athens.
122 THE NEW SCIENCE
VIII
423 It is the same with Draco, author of the laws written in blood at the
time when, as noted above, Greek history tells us Athens was occupied by the
optimates. This, as we shall presently see, was in the time of the heroic aristoc-
racies, in which Greek history also tells us the Heraclids were scattered through
all Greece, even into Attica (as we set forth above in the Chronological Table).
They finally settled in the Peloponnesus and established their kingdom in Sparta,
which will be shown to have been certainly an aristocratic commonwealth. Draco
must have been one of the Gorgon's serpents nailed to the shield of Perseus,
which will be found to signify the rule of the laws. This shield with the frightful
penalties it bore turned to stone those who looked upon it; just as in sacred
history similar laws were called leges sanguinls, laws of blood, because of the
exemplary punishments they carried. Minerva, who was called Athena for rea-
sons to be fully set forth below, armed herself with this shield. And among the
Chinese, who write in hieroglyphics to this day, a dragon is the ensign of the
civil power. It is something to wonder at that two nations so distant from each
other in space and time should think and express themselves in the same poetic
manner. For in all Greek history nothing else is told of this Draco.
IX
424 This discovery of the poetic characters confirms us in placing Aesop
considerably earlier than the Seven Sages of Greece, as in the Notes to the
Chronological Table [91] we promised to show in this place. For this philo-
logical truth is confirmed for us by the following history of human ideas. The
seven sages were admired because they began to impart precepts of morality
or of civil doctrine in the form of maxims like the famous "Know thyself" of
Solon, who was their prince. We have seen above that this was a precept of
civil doctrine, later carried over into metaphysics and morals. But Aesop had
previously imparted such counsels in the form of comparisons, which the poets
had still earlier used to express themselves. And the order of human ideas is to
observe the similarities of things first to express itself and later for purposes of
proof. Proof, in turn, is first by example, for which a single likeness suffices^
and finally by induction, for which more are required. Socrates, father of all the
sects of philosophers, introduced dialectic by induction, which Aristotle later
perfected with the syllogism, which cannot proceed without a universal. But to
undeveloped minds it suffices to present a single likeness in order to persuade
them; as, by a single fable of the sort invented by Aesop, the worthy Menenius
Agrippa reduced the rebellious Roman plebs to obedience.
425 That Aesop was a poetic character of the socii or famuli of the
heroes, is revealed to us with prophetic insight by the urbane Phaedrus in one
of the prologs of his Fables:
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 123
Attend me briefly while I now disclose
How art of fable telling first arose.
Unhappy slaves, in servitude confined,
Dared not to their harsh masters show their mind,
But under veiling of the fable's dress
Contrived their thoughts and feelings to express,
Escaping still their lords' affronted wrath.
So Aesop did; I widen out his path, 2
as is clearly confirmed for us by his fable of the lion's share. For the plebeians,
as noted in the Axioms [259], were called socii of the heroic cities, and shared
the hardships and dangers of war but not the spoils and the conquests. Hence
Aesop was called a slave, because the plebeians, as will presently be shown, were
famuli of the heroes. And he was represented as ugly, because civil beauty was
considered to come only from solemnized marriages, and only the heroes con-
tracted such marriages, as will also be shown. For the same reason Thersites was
ugly, for he must have been a character of the plebeians who served the heroes
in the Trojan war. He was beaten by Ulysses with the scepter of Agamemnon,
just as the ancient Roman plebeians were beaten by the nobles with rods over
their bare shoulders regium in morem, "in royal fashion," as Sallust puts it in
St. Augustine's City of God until the Porcian law freed Roman shoulders from
the rod.
426 Such counsels, then, dictated by natural reason as useful to free civil
life, must have been sentiments cherished by the plebs of the heroic cities. Aesop
was made a poetic character of these plebs in this respect. Later, fables having to
do with moral philosophy were ascribed to him, and he was turned into the
first moral philosopher, just as Solon, who by his laws made Athens a free com-
monwealth, was turned into a sage. And because Aesop counseled in fables, he
was supposed to have lived before Solon, who counseled in maxims. These fables
must have been conceived originally in heroic verse. There is a tradition that
they were later conceived in iambic verse (which we shall later find the Greek
peoples to have spoken). This is intermediate between heroic verse and prose.
They were finally written in prose and have reached us in that form.
X
427 In this way the later discoveries of esoteric wisdom were attributed
to the first authors of vulgar wisdom; and [poetic characters like] Zoroaster in
the East, Trismegistus in Egypt, Orpheus in Greece, Pythagoras in Italy,
2 Nunc jabularum cur sit inventum genus,
Brevt docebo. Servitus obnoxia,
Quta, quae volebat, non audebat dicere,
Affectus proprtos in jabcllas transtnltt.
Aesopi illius semita jeciviam. . . .
124 THE NEW SCIENCE
originally lawgivers, were finally believed to have been philosophers, as Con-
fucius is today in China. For certainly the Pythagoreans in Magna Graecia, as
will later be shown, were so called in the sense of nobles who, having tried to
reduce all their commonwealths from popular to aristocratic, were all slain. And
the Carmen aureum of Pythagoras has been shown above [128] to have been
an imposture, as were also the Oracles of Zoroaster, the Poimander of Trismegis-
tus, and the Or p hies or verses of Orpheus. There did not come down to the
ancients any book on philosophy written by Pythagoras, and Philolaus was the
first Pythagorean to write one, as Scheffer observes in his De philosophia italica.
[CHAPTER IV]
COROLLARIES CONCERNING THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGES AND
LETTERS; AND, THEREIN, THE ORIGINS OF HIEROGLYPHICS,
LAWS, NAMES, FAMILY ARMS, MEDALS AND MONEY J AND
HENCE OF THE FIRST LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF THE
NATURAL LAW OF NATIONS
428 Now from the theology of the poets, or poetic metaphysics, by way
of the poetic logic sprung from it, we go on to discover the origin of languages
and letters. Concerning these there are as many opinions as there are scholars
who have written on the subject. So that Gerard Jan Vossius says in his Gram-
matical "With regard to the invention of letters, many authors have brought
together many things, in such profusion and confusion that you go away from
them more uncertain than you came." And Herman Hugo in his De prima
scribendi origine observes: "There is no other subject on which more numerous
or more conflicting opinions are to be found than in the discussion of the origin
of letters and writing. How many conflicts of opinion! What is one to believe?
What not believe?" Not without reason, therefore, did Bernard von Mallinckrodt,
in his De natura et usu literarum, conclude from the impossibility of understand-
ing how they arose that they were divine inventions; in which view he was fol-
lowed by Ingewald Eling in his Historia linguae graecae.
429 But the difficulty as to the manner of their origin was created by the
scholars themselves, all of whom regarded the origin of letters as a separate
question from that of the origin of languages, whereas the two were by nature
conjoined. And they should have made out as much from the words for grammar
and for characters. From the former, because grammar is defined as the art of
speaking, yet grammata are letters, so that grammar should have been defined
as the art of writing. So, indeed, it was defined by Aristotle, and so in fact it
originally was; for, as will here be shown, all nations began to speak by writing,
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 125
since all were originally mute. The word character, on the other hand, means
idea, form, model, and certainly poetic characters came before those of articu-
late sounds. Josephus stoutly maintains, against the Greek grammarian Apion,
that at the time of Homer the so-called vulgar letters had not yet been invented.
Moreover, if these letters had been forms representing articulated sounds instead
of being arbitrary signs, they would have been uniform among all nations, as
the articulated sounds themselves are. But, giving up hope of knowing how
languages and letters began, scholars have failed to learn that the first nations
thought in poetic characters, spoke in fables, and wrote in hieroglyphics. These
should have been the principles, which must by their nature be most certain, of
philosophy in its study of human ideas and of philology in its study of human
words.
430 Having now to enter upon a discussion of this matter, we shall give
a brief sample of the opinions that have been held respecting it opinions so un-
certain, frivolous, inept, pretentious or ridiculous, and so numerous, that we
need not relate them. By way of sample, then: because in the returned barbarian
times Scandinavia by the conceit of the nations was called vagina gentium and
was believed to be the mother of all other nations in the world, therefore by the
conceit of the scholars Johannes and Olaus Magnus were of opinion that their
Goths had preserved from the beginning of the world the letters divinely in-
vented by Adam. This dream was laughed at by all the scholars, but this did not
keep Johannes van Gorp from following suit and going one better by claiming
that his own Dutch language, which is not much different from Saxon, has come
down from the Earthly Paradise and is the mother of all other languages. This
claim was ridiculed by Joseph Justus Scaliger, Philipp Camerarius, Christian
Becman, and Martin Schoock. And yet this conceit swelled to the bursting point
in the Atlantica of Olof Rudbeck, who will have it that the Greek letters came
from the runes; that the Phoenician letters, to which Cadmus gave the order
and values of those of the Hebrews, were inverted runes; and that the Greeks
finally straightened them here and rounded them there by rule and compass.
And because the inventor is called Merkurssman among the Scandinavians, he
will have it that the Mercury who invented letters for the Egyptians was a Goth.
Such license in rendering opinions concerning the origins of letters should pre-
pare the reader to receive the things we shall say of them here not merely with
impartial readiness to see what they bring forward that is new, but with diligence
to meditate upon them and to accept them for what they must be: namely, prin-
ciples of all the human and divine knowledge of the gentile world,
431 The philosophers and philologians should all have begun to treat of
the origins of languages and letters from the following principles, (i) That
the first men of the gentile world conceived ideas of things by imaginative char-
acters of animate and mute substances. (2) That they expressed themselves by
means of gestures or physical objects which had natural relations with the
ideas; for example, three ears of grain, or acting as if swinging a scythe three
n6 THE NEW SCIENCE
times, to signify three years. (3) That they thus expressed themselves by a lan-
guage with natural significations. (Plato and lamblichus said such a language
had once been spoken in the world; it must have been the most ancient language
of Atlantis, which scholars would have us believe expressed ideas by the nature
of the things, that is, by their natural properties.) It is because the philosophers
and philologians have treated separately these two things which, as we have
said, arc naturally conjoined [the origins of languages and letters], that the in-
quiry into the origins of letters has proved so difficult for them, involving equal
difficulty with the inquiry into the origins of languages, with which they have
been either not at all or very little concerned.
432 At the outset of our discussion, then, we posit as our first principle
the philological axiom [173] that according to the Egyptians there had been
spoken in their world in all preceding time three languages corresponding in
number and order to the three ages that had elapsed in their world: the ages
of gods, heroes, and men. The first language had been hieroglyphic, sacred or
divine; the second, symbolic, by signs or by heroic devices; the third, epistolary,
for men at a distance to communicate to each other the current needs of their
lives. Concerning these three languages there are two golden passages in Homer's
Iliad, from which it clearly appears that the Greeks agreed with the Egyptians in
this matter. In the first it is told how Nestor lived through three generations of
men speaking different languages. Nestor must therefore have been a heroic
character of the chronology determined by the three languages corresponding
to the three ages of the Egyptians; and the phrase "to live the years of Nestor"
must have meant "to live the years of the world." The other passage is that in
which Aeneas relates to Achilles that men of different language began to in-
habit Ilium after Troy was moved to the seashore and Pergamum became its
fortress. To this first principle we join the tradition, also Egyptian, that their
Thoth or Mercury invented both laws and letters.
433 Around this truth we assemble the following others. Among the
Greeks the words name and character had the same meaning, so that the Church
Fathers used indiscriminately the two expressions de divinis character thus and
de divinis nominibus. Name and definition have also the same meaning; thus, in
rhetoric, under the head of quaestio nominis we find a search for definition of
the fact, and in medicine the nomenclature of diseases is the head under which
their nature is defined. Among the Romans names meant originally and properly
houses branching into many families. And that the first Greeks had also used
names in this sense is shown by the patronymics or names of fathers, which
are so often used by the poets and above all by Homer. (According to Livy, a
tribune of the plebs defined the patricians as those qui possum nomine cierc
patrem, "who can use the surnames of their fathers.") These patronymics later
disappeared in the popular liberty of all the rest of Greece, but were preserved
by the Heraclids in the aristocratic commonwealth of Sparta. In Roman law
nomcn signifies fight. Similarly in Greek nomos signifies law, and from nomos
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 127
comes nomisma, "money,** as Aristotle notes; and according to etymologists
nomos becomes in Latin nummus. In French, lot means "law,** and aloi means
"money"; and among the second barbarians the term canon was applied both to
ecclesiastical law and to the annual rent paid by the feudal leaseholder to the
lord of the land he held in fief. This uniformity of thinking perhaps explains
why the Latins used the term ius both for law and for the fat of sacrificed animals,
which was Jove's due; for Jove was originally called lous, from which were
later derived the genitives lovis and iuris (as pointed out above). Among the
Hebrews also, of the three parts into which they divided the animal sacrificed as
a peace-offering, the fat was accounted God's due and was burnt on the altar.
The Latin praedia, "estates" (a term which must have been applied to rustic
earlier than to urban estates), were so called because, as we shall presently show,
the first cultivated fields were the first booty (praeda) in the world. The first
taming was of such fields, which were therefore in ancient Roman law called
manucaptae (whence manceps for one under real-estate bond to the public
treasury); and in Roman laws iura praediorum remained a term for the so-
called real servitudes, which were attached to real estate. And lands referred
to as manucaptae must at first have been called mancipia; and it is certainly in
this sense that we must understand the article of the Law of the Twelve Tables,
Qui nexum jaciet mancipiumque, that is, "Whoever consigns the bond, con-
signs therewith the manor." The Italians, following the same line of thought as
the ancient Romans, called the manors poderi, as having been acquired by force.
Further evidence: The returned barbarism called the fields with their boundaries
presas terrarum. The Spaniards call bold enterprises prendas. The Italians call
family coats-of-arms imprese, and use termini in the sense of "words" (a usage
surviving in scholastic dialectic). They also call family coats-of-arms insegne,
from which is derived the verb tnsegnare, "to teach." So Homer, in whose time
so-called vulgar letters had not yet been invented, says Proetus' letter to Eureia
against Bellerophon was written in semata t "signs."
434 To crown all these things, let the following three incontrovertible
truths be added. ( i ) Since it has been demonstrated that the first gentile nations
were all mute in their beginnings, they must have expressed themselves by ges-
tures or by physical objects having natural relations with their ideas. (2) They
must have used signs to fix the boundaries of their estates and to have enduring
witnesses of their rights. (3) They all made use of money. All these truths will
give us the origins of languages and letters, and thereby of hieroglyphics, laws,
names, family coats-of-arms, medals, money, and of the language and writing
in which the first natural law of nations was spoken and written.
435 In order to establish more firmly the principles of all this, we must
here uproot the false opinion held by some of the Egyptians that the hieroglyphics
were invented by philosophers to conceal in them their mysteries of lofty esoteric
wisdom. For it was by a common natural necessity that all the first nations
spoke in hieroglyphics (concerning which an axiom [226] has been proposed
128 THE NEW SCIENCE
above). In Africa, to the case of Egypt already noted, we may add, following
Heliodorus in his Aethiopica, the Ethiopians, who used as hieroglyphics the
tools of all the mechanical arts. In the East the magic characters of the Chal-
deans must have been hieroglyphics. In northern Asia, as we have seen above,
Idanthyrsus king of the Scythians (quite late in their extremely long history, in
which they had conquered even the Egyptians who boasted themselves the most
ancient of all nations) used five real words to answer Darius the Great, who had
declared war on him. These five were a frog, a mouse, a bird, a ploughshare, and
a bow. The frog signified that he, Idanthyrsus, was born of the earth of Scythia,
as frogs are born of the earth in summer rains, and so that he was a son of that
land. The mouse signified that he, like a mouse, had made his home where he
was born; that is, that he had established his nation there. The bird signified
that in that place he had his auspices; that is, as we shall see, that he was sub-
ject to none but God. The ploughshare signified that he had reduced those
lands to cultivation, and thus tamed and made them his own by force. And
finally the bow signified that as supreme commander of the arms of Scythia he
had the duty and might to defend her. This explanation, so natural and neces-
sary, is to be set against the ridiculous ones worked out, according to St. Cyril,
by the counselors of Darius. Add to the interpretation of the Scythian hiero-
glyphics by Darius's counselors the far-fetched, artificial and contorted inter-
pretations by scholars of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and it will be evident that
in general the true and proper use made of hieroglyphics by the first peoples
has hitherto not been understood. As for the Latins, Roman history has not left
us without such a tradition; witness the mute heroic answer which Tarquinius
Superbus sends to his son in Gabii, when in the presence of the messenger he
cuts off the heads of poppies with the stick he has in his hands. In northern
Europe, as Tacitus observes in describing their customs, the ancient Germans
were not acquainted with the secrets of letters (lltcrarum secreta) \ that is, that
they did not know how to write their hieroglyphics. This must have remained
the case down to the times of Frederick the Swabian, indeed to those of Rudolph
of Hapsburg, when they began to write state papers in vulgar German script.
In northern France there was a hieroglyphic speech called rebus of Picardy,
which must have been, as in Germany, a speech by physical things; that is, by
the hieroglyphics of Idanthyrsus. Even in Ultima Thule, in fact in its remotest
part, namely Scotland, as Hector Boece relates in his history of that nation, they
wrote in hieroglyphics in ancient times. In the West Indies the Mexicans were
found to write in hieroglyphics, and Jan de Laet in his description of the new
India describes the hieroglyphics of the Indians as divers heads of animals, plants,
flowers and fruits, and notes that they distinguish families by their cippi; which
is the same use that is made of family coats-of-arms in our world. In the East
Indies the Chinese stUl write in hieroglyphics.
436 Thus is deflated the conceit of the scholars who came afterwards,
a conceit to which that of the extremely conceited Egyptians dared not swell
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 129
itself: namely, that the other sages of the world had learned from the Egyptians
how to conceal their esoteric wisdom under hieroglyphics.
437 Having posited these principles of poetic logic and dissipated this
conceit of the scholars, we return to the three languages of the Egyptians. The
first of these, that of the gods, is attested for the Greeks by Homer, who, in five
passages of his two poems, as noted in the Axioms [174], makes mention of a
language more ancient than his own, which is certainly heroic, and calls it
"language of the gods." Three of the passages are in the Iliad: the first where
he tells that the creature called Briareus by the gods was called Aegaeon by men;
the second where he speaks of a bird called chalet da by the gods and \umlndin
by men; the third where he says the river of Troy is called Xanthus by the gods,
Scamander by men. In the Odyssey there are two passages: one where he says
what men call Scylla and Charybdis the gods call plantyas petras; the other
where Mercury gives Ulysses a secret remedy against the enchantments of Circe,
an herb called moly by the gods, knowledge of which is denied to men. Plato
has many things to say about these passages, but to no purpose; so that Dion
Chrysostom later slanderously accuses Homer of pretending to understand the
language of the gods, which naturally is denied to men. But we may question
whether in these Homeric passages we should not read "heroes" in place of
"gods"; for, as will presently be shown, the heroes took the name of gods over
the plebeians of their cities, whom they called men (as in the returned barbarian
times the vassals were called homines, to the great astonishment of Hotman),
and the great lords (as in the returned barbarism) made a vaunt of possessing
marvelous medical secrets. Thus the differences referred to may have been no
more than differences between noble and vulgar speech. Be that as it may, there
can be no doubt that among the Latins Varro occupied himself with the lan-
guage of the gods, for he had the diligence to collect thirty thousand of their
names, which would have sufficed for a copious divine vocabulary, with which
the peoples of Latium might express all their human needs, which in those
simple and frugal times must have been few indeed, being only the things that
were necessary to life. The Greeks too had gods to the number of thirty thou-
sand, as has also been noted in the Axioms [ 175] ; for they made a deity of every
stone, spring, brook, plant and off-shore rock. Such deities included the dryads,
hamadryads, oreads and napeads. Just so the American Indians make a god
of everything that exceeds their limited understanding. Thus the divine fables
of the Greeks and Latins must have been the true first hieroglyphics, or sacred
or divine characters, corresponding to those of the Egyptians.
438 The second kind of speech, corresponding to the age of heroes, was
said by the Egyptians to have been spoken by symbols. To these may be re-
duced the heroic emblems, which must have been the mute comparisons which
Homer calls semata (the signs in which the heroes wrote). In consequence they
must have been metaphors, images, similitudes or comparisons, which, having
passed into articulate speech, supplied all the resources of poetic expression. For
I 3 o THE NEW SCIENCE
certainly Homer, if we accept the resolute denial of Josephus the Jew that there
has come down to us any writer more ancient than he, was the first author of the
Greek tongue; and, since we owe to the Greeks all that has reached us of the
gentile world, he was the first author of that entire world. Among the Latins
the earliest memorials of their tongue are the fragments of the Salian songs,
and the first writer of whom there is mention is Livius Andronicus the poet.
With the recurrence of barbarism in Europe, new languages were born. The first
language of the Spaniards was that which is called romance, and consequently
that of heroic poetry, for the romancers were the heroic poets of the returned
barbarian times. In France the first writer in vulgar French was Arnaut Daniel
Pacca, the first of all the Provencal poets, who flourished in the eleventh cen-
tury. And finally the first writers in Italy were the Florentine and Sicilian
rhymers.
439 The epistolary speech of the Egyptians, suitable for expressing the
needs of common everyday life in communication from a distance, must have
been born of the lower classes of a dominant people in Egypt, which must have
been that of Thebes (whose king Ramses, as noted above, extended his rule over
all that great nation), because for the Egyptians that language corresponds to
the age of men, the term used for the plebeians of the heroic peoples to dif-
ferentiate them from the heroes, as noted above. This language must be under-
stood as having sprung up by their free consent, by this eternal property, that
vulgar speech and writing are a right of the people. When the emperor Claudius
found three additional letters necessary to the Latin language, the Roman peo-
ple would not accept them; nor have the Italians accepted those devised by
Giorgio Trissino, though their lack is felt in Italian.
440 The epistolary or vulgar language of the Egyptians must have been
written with letters likewise vulgar. Since the vulgar letters of the Egyptians
resemble those of the Phoenicians, it is necessary to suppose that one of these
peoples borrowed from the other. Those who think that the Egyptians were
the first discoverers of all the things necessary or useful to human society, must
consequently hold that the Egyptians taught their letters to the Phoenicians. But
Clement the Alexandrian, who must have been better informed than any other
author in matters Egyptian, relates that Sanchuniathon or Sancuniates the
Phoenician (who in the Chronological Table is placed in the heroic age of
Greece) had written the history of Phoenicia in vulgar letters; and he therefore
proposes him as the first author of the gentile world to have written in vulgar
characters. In this connection it has to be said that the Phoenicians, certainly
the first merchant people of the world, having entered Egypt for trading pur-
poses, may well have carried thither their vulgar letters. But, entirely apart from
argument or conjecture, vulgar tradition assures us that these same Phoenicians
brought their letters to Greece. Tacitus, examining this tradition, suggests that
they passed off as their own invention the letters invented by others, meaning
the Egyptian hieroglyphics. But, to allow the popular tradition some ground of
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 131
truth (as we have proved all such traditions must have [144]), let us say that
the Phoenicians brought to Greece hieroglyphics received from others, and that
these could only have been the mathematical characters or geometric figures
which they had received from the Chaldeans. The latter were beyond question
the first mathematicians and especially the first astronomers of the nations;
whence Zoroaster the Chaldean (whose name means "observer of the stars'*
according to Bochart) was the first sage of the gentile world. The Phoenicians
used these Chaldean characters as notations for numbers in their mercantile busi-
ness, in pursuit of which long before Homer's time they frequented the shores
of Greece. This is made evident by Homer's own poems, and especially the
Odyssey. For in Homer's time, as Josephus vigorously maintains against the
Greek grammarian Apion, vulgar letters had not yet been invented by the
Greeks. But the latter, with supreme genius, in which they certainly surpassed
all nations, took over these geometric forms to represent the various articulated
sounds, and shaped them into vulgar characters of letters with consummate
beauty. These were later adopted by the Latins, whose letters, as Tacitus himself
observes, resembled the most ancient Greek ones. Weighty proof of this is the
fact that the Greeks for a long period, and the Latins down to their latest times,
used capital letters to represent numbers. It must have been these letters that
were taught to the Latins by Demaratus the Corinthian and by Carmenta, the
wife of Evander the Arcadian. We shall explain presently that in ancient times
Greek colonies had been taken to Latium by sea and by land.
441 There is no worth in the contention of many scholars that, because
the Hebrews and the Greeks give almost the same names to their vulgar letters,
the Greeks must have got theirs from the Hebrews. It is more reasonable that
the Hebrews should have imitated the Greek nomenclature than vice versa. For
it is universally agreed that from the time that Alexander the Great conquered
the empire of the East (which after his death was divided by his captains)
Greek speech spread throughout Egypt and the East. And since it is also gen-
erally agreed that grammar was introduced quite late among the Hebrews, it
follows necessarily that the Hebrew men of letters called their Hebrew letters
by the Greek names. Moreover, since the elements [of anything] are very simple
in nature, the Greeks must at first have called their letters by the simplest sounds
[e.g. "ah" for ], and it must have been for that reason that the letters were
called elements. The Latins, following suit, called them with the same gravity,
and also kept the forms of the letters like the most ancient Greek ones. We
must therefore conclude that calling the letters by complex names [e.g. "alpha'*
for a] was introduced late among the Greeks, and later still brought by the
Greeks to the Hebrews in the East.
442 These arguments confute the opinion of those who would have it
that Cecrops the Egyptian brought vulgar letters to the Greeks. Another opin-
ion, that Cadmus the Phoenician must have brought them from Egypt into
Greece because he founded a city there and named it Thebes after the capital of
132 THE NEW SCIENCE
the greatest Egyptian dynasty, will be refuted presently by the principles of
Poetic Geography, by which it will appear that the Greeks who went to Egypt
called the Egyptian capital Thebes because it bore a resemblance to their native
city of that name. And finally we understand why cautious critics, cited by an
anonymous English writer on the uncertainty of the sciences [Thomas Baker,
Reflections on Learning], conclude from the too early date assigned to San-
cuniates that he never existed. We, accordingly, not to put him out of the world
entirely, judge that he must be set in a later age, certainly after Homer. And
to allow the Phoenicians priority over the Greeks in the invention of the so-called
vulgar letters (not failing, however, to take into account that the Greeks had
more genius than the Phoenicians), it has to be said that Sancuniates must have
lived a little before Herodotus, who was called the father of Greek history, which
he wrote in the vulgar speech. For Sancuniates was called the historian of truth;
that is, a writer of what Varro in his division of times calls the historical time.
In that time, according to the Egyptian division of three languages correspond-
ing to the three ages of the world that had elapsed before them, they spoke in
the epistolary language written in vulgar characters.
443 Now, as the heroic or poetic language was founded by the heroes,
so the vulgar languages were introduced by the common people, whom we shall
find to have been the plebs of the heroic peoples. By the Latins these languages
were properly called vernacular. They could not, however, have been introduced
by those vcrnac defined by the grammarians as slaves born at home of enslaved
prisoners of war, for these naturally learn the languages of their parents' peo-
ples. But the first and properly so-called vernae, as will be shown, were the
famult of the heroes in the state of the families. These famuli, of whom the
masses of the first plebs of the heroic cities were later composed, were pre-
cursors of the slaves later secured by the cities through war. All this is con-
firmed by the two languages of which Homer speaks: the one of the gods, the
other of men, which above we interpreted as the heroic and the vulgar language,
which we shall shortly explain more fully.
444 The philologians have all accepted with an excess of good faith the
view that in the vulgar languages meanings were fixed by convention. On the
contrary, because of their natural origins, they must have had natural significa-
tions. This is easy to observe in vulgar Latin (which is more heroic than vulgar
Greek, and therefore as much more robust as the latter is more refined), which
has formed almost all its words by metaphors drawn from natural objects ac-
cording to their natural properties or sensible effects. And in general metaphor
makes up the great body of the language among all nations. But the gram-
marians, encountering great numbers of words which give confused and indis-
tinct ideas of things, and not knowing their origins, which had made them at
first clear and distinct, have given peace to their ignorance by setting up the
universal maxim that articulate human words have arbitrary significations. And
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 133
they have dragged in Aristotle, Galen and other philosophers, and armed them
against Plato and lamblichus, as we have said [227].
445 There remains, however, the very great difficulty: How is it that
there are as many different vulgar tongues as there are peoples ? To solve it, we
must here establish this great truth: that, as the peoples have certainly by
diversity of climates acquired different natures, from which have sprung as
many different customs, so from their different natures and customs as many
different languages have arisen. For by virtue of the aforesaid diversity of their
natures they have regarded the same utilities or necessities of human life from
different points of view, and there have thus arisen so many national customs,
for the most part differing from one another and at times contrary to each
other; so and not otherwise there have arisen as many different languages as
there are nations. An evident confirmation of this is found in the proverbs,
which are maxims of human life, the same in substance but expressed from as
many points of view as there are or have been different nations, as has been
noted in the Axioms [161]. Thus the same heroic origins, preserved in brief in
the vulgar tongues, have given rise to the phenomenon so astonishing to biblical
critics: that the names of the same kings appear in one form in sacred and in
another in profane history. The reason is that the one perchance considers men
with regard to their appearance or power, the other with regard to their cus-
toms, undertakings, or whatever else it may have been. In the same way we still
find the cities of Hungary given one name by the Hungarians, another by the
Greeks, another by the Germans, another by the Turks. The German language,
which is a living heroic language, transforms almost all names from foreign
languages into its own. We may conjecture that the Latins and Greeks did the
same when we find them discussing so many barbarian matters with Greek and
Latin elegance. This must be the cause of the obscurity encountered in ancient
geography and in the natural history of fossils, plants and animals. And for this
reason we excogitated, in the first edition of this work, an Idea of a Mental Dic-
tionary for assigning meanings to all the different articulate languages, reducing
them all to certain unities of ideas in substance, which, considered from various
points of view, have come to be expressed by different words in each. We make
continual use of this in working out the argument of our Science. And we
gave a very full example of it in the fourth chapter [actually book III, chapter
41], where we showed that the fathers of families, considered from fifteen dif-
ferent points of view in the state of the families and of the first commonwealths,
at the time when the languages must have been taking form, were called by
an equal number of different names by fifteen nations ancient and modern. (And
most weighty are those arguments concerning the things of that time which are
taken from the original meanings of the words, as set forth in the Axioms [240].)
This is one of the three passages on account of which we do not regret the pub-
lication of that book. The aforesaid Dictionary develops in a new way the argu-
134 THE NEW SCIENCE
ment presented by Thomas Hayne in his dissertation on the kinship of lan-
guages and in his others on languages in general and on the harmony of various
languages. From all this we infer the following corollary: that languages are
more beautiful in proportion as they are richer in these condensed heroic ex-
pressions; that they are more beautiful because they are more evident; and that
because they are more evident they are truer and more faithful. And that on the
contrary, in proportion as they are more crowded with words of unknown origin,
they are less delightful, because obscure and confused, and therefore more likely
to deceive and lead astray. The latter must be the case with languages formed
by the mixture of many barbarous tongues, the history of whose original and
metaphorical meanings has not come down to us.
446 To enter now upon the extremely difficult [question of the] way
in which these three kinds of languages and letters were formed, we must estab-
lish this principle: that as gods, heroes and men began at the same time (for
they were after all men who imagined the gods and believed their own heroic
nature to be a mixture of the divine and human natures), so these three lan-
guages began at the same time, each having its letters, which developed along
with it. They began, however, with these three very great differences: that the
language of the gods was almost entirely mute, only very slightly articulate;
the language of the heroes, an equal mixture of articulate and mute, and con-
sequently of vulgar speech and of the heroic characters used in writing by the
heroes, which Homer calls semata; the language of men, almost entirely articu-
late and only very slightly mute, there being no vulgar language so copious that
there are not more things than it has words for. Thus necessarily the heroic lan-
guage was in the beginning disordered in the extreme; and this is a great source
of the obscurity of the fables. The fable of Cadmus will serve as a signal example.
Cadmus slays the great serpent, sows its teeth, armed men spring up from the
furrows, he throws a great rock among them, they fight to the death, and finally
Cadmus himself changes into a serpent. So ingenious was this Cadmus, who
brought letters to the Greeks, by whom this fable has been transmitted, that, as
we shall explain presently, it contains several centuries of poetic history!
447 To follow up what has already been said: at the same time that the
divine character of Jove took shape the first human thought in the gentile
world articulate language began to develop by way of onomatopoeia, through
which we still find children happily expressing themselves. By the Latins Jove
was at first, from the roar of the thunder, called lous; by the Greeks, from the
whistle of the lightning, Zeus; by the Easterners, from the sound of burning
fire, he must have been called Ur f whence came Urim, the power of fire; and
from this same origin must have come the Greek ouranos, sky, and the Latin
verb uro t to burn. From the whistle of the lightning must also have come the
Latin eel, one of the monosyllables of Ausonius, pronounced however with the
Spanish cedilla (f), which is required to give point to Ausonius's own jesting
line about Venuj: Nat a salo, suscepta solo, patre edita caelo, "Born of the sea,
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 135
adopted by the soil, raised by her father to the sky." With respect to these origins
it is to be noted that the same sublimity of invention evinced in the fable of
Jove, which we have observed above, marks the beginning of poetic locution
in onomatopoeia, which Dionysius Longinus certainly includes among the
sources of the sublime, and which he illustrates from Homer, citing the sizzling
sound (siz') emitted by the eye of Polyphemus when Ulysses pierces it with
the fiery stake.
448 Human words were formed next from interjections, which are
sounds articulated under the impetus of violent passions. In all languages these
are monosyllables. Thus it is not beyond likelihood that, when wonder had
been awakened in men by the first thunderbolts, these interjections of Jove
should give birth to one produced by the human voice: "pal"; and that this
should then be doubled: " pa pel" From this interjection of wonder was sub-
sequently derived Jove's title of "father of men and gods," and thus it came
about presently that all the gods were called fathers, and the goddesses, mothers;
whence the Latin names lupiter, Dicspiter, Marspiter, luno genitrix. The fables
certainly tell us that Juno was sterile; and we have observed above that many
other gods and goddesses did not marry among their kind. (Venus was called
the concubine, not the wife, of Mars.) None the less they were all called fathers.
(On this point there are some verses of Lucilius which we have cited in the
Notes to our Universal Law.) They were called fathers in the sense in which
patrare originally meant to do or make, which is the prerogative of God. Patrare
occurs thus even in Scripture, where, in the story of the creation of the world,
it is said that on the seventh day God rested ab opere quod patrarat, "from the
work which He had done." Thence must have been derived the verb impetrare,
as if for Impatrare. The form used in the science of augury was impetrtre, "to
obtain a good augury," concerning whose origin the Latin grammarians have
written so much nonsense. This proves that the first interpretation (tnterpretatio
as if for inter pair atlo) was the interpretation of the divine laws declared by the
auspices.
449 The strong men in the family state, from a natural ambition of human
pride, arrogated to themselves this divine title of "fathers" (a fact which may
have been the ground for the vulgar tradition that the first strong men of the
earth had caused themselves to be adored as gods); but, observing the piety
they owed to the deities, they called the latter gods. Later, when the strong men
of the first cities took the name of gods upon themselves, they were moved by
the same piety to call the deities "immortal gods," to differentiate them from
themselves, the "mortal gods." But in this may be observed the grossness of these
giants, like that which travelers report of los patacones [170]. A fair trace of it
has remained in the ancient Latin words pipulum and pipare, in the sense of
"complaint" and "to complain," which must be derived from the interjection of
lament, "pi, pi" Pipulum in this sense in Plautus is generally interpreted as
synonymous with obvagulaiio in the Twelve Tables, which must come from
i 3 6 THE NEW SCIENCE
vagirc, which is properly the crying of children. A similar origin from the inter-
jection of fear must be assigned to the Greek word paian, which begins with pal.
Concerning this the Greeks have a very ancient golden tradition to the effect
that when they were terrified by the great serpent called Python they invoked
the aid of Apollo with the words id paidn. Dazed with fear, they first pronounced
them slowly three times, but then, when Apollo had slain the Python, they
jubilantly pronounced them another three times quickly, dividing the omega
into two omicrons and the diphthong ai into two syllables. Thus naturally was
Greek heroic verse at first spondaic and then dactylic, and it has retained this
eternal property, that it gives preference to the dactyl in every foot except the
last. Song arose naturally, in the measure of heroic verse, under the impulse of
most violent passions, even as we still observe men sing when moved by great
passions, especially extreme happiness or grief, as has been said in the Axioms
[229]. What has been said here will shortly be of much use when we discuss
the origins of song and verse.
450 They went on to form pronouns; for interjections give vent to one's
own passions, a thing which one can do even by oneself, but pronouns serve
in sharing our ideas with others concerning things which we cannot name or
whose names another may not understand. Pronouns are likewise in all lan-
guages for the greater part, if not quite all, monosyllables. The first of them, or
at least among the first, must have been the one which occurs in that golden
passage of Ennius: As f ice hoc sublime cadens, quern omnes invocant lovem,
"Behold this sublime overhanging, which all invoke as Jove," where hoc stands
for caelum t the sky. It occurs also in vulgar Latin: Luciscit hoc iam t for albcscit
caelum, "the sky grows light." And articles from the time of their first appear-
ance have this eternal property: that they go before the nouns to which they are
attached.
451 Later were formed the particles, of which a great part are the prep-
ositions, which also, in almost all languages, arc monosyllables. These preserve
in the name they bear this eternal property: that they go before the nouns which
require them and the verbs with which they form compounds.
452 Gradually nouns were formed. In the chapter on the Origins of the
Latin Language in the first edition of this work, we listed a great number of
nouns which sprang up within LaUum, beginning with the sylvan life of the
Latins and continuing through their rural into their earliest city life; all of them
formed as monosyllables, showing no trace of foreign origin, not even Greek, ex-
cept for four words: bous, sus f mm, and seps, the last of which means "hedge"
in Latin and "serpent" in Greek. This is the second of the three passages in that
work which we regard as adequate. It may serve as a model to scholars of other
languages in investigating their origins to the great profit of the republic of
letters. Certainly in the German language, for instance, which is a mother lan-
guage (because foreign nations never entered that country to rule over it), the
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 137
roots are all monosyllabic. And that nouns sprang up before verbs is proved by
this eternal property: that there is no significant discourse that does not begin
with a noun, expressed or understood, which governs it.
453 Last of all the authors of the languages formed the verbs, as we ob-
serve children expressing nouns and particles but leaving the verbs to be under-
stood. For nouns awaken ideas which leave firm traces; particles, signifying
modifications, do the same; but verbs signify motions, which involve past and
future, which are measured from the indivisible present, which even philosophers
find very hard to understand. Our assertion may be supported by a medical
observation. There is a good man living among us who, after a severe apoplectic
stroke, utters nouns but has completely forgotten verbs. Even the verbs which
are genera of all the others as sum is of being, to which are reduced all es-
sences, which is as much as to say all metaphysical things; sto of rest and eo of
motion, to which are reduced ail physical things; do, dico and jacio, to which
are reduced all matters of action, whether moral, economic or civil these verbs
must have begun as imperatives. For in the state of the families, which was ex-
tremely poor in language, the fathers alone must have spoken and given com-
mands to their children and famuli, who, under the terrors of patriarchal rule,
as we shall soon see, must have executed the commands in silence and with
blind obsequiousness. These imperatives are all monosyllables, as they have re-
mained: es, sta, i t da, die, fac, "be," "stand," "go," "give," "say," "make."
454 This [theory of the] genesis of languages is in conformity with the
principles of universal nature, by which the elements of ail things, out of which
they are composed and into which they are bound to be resolved, are indivisible;
and also with the principles of human nature in particular, according to the
axiom [231] that "children, even in the present copiousness of language into
which they are born, and in spite of the extreme flexibility of the fibers of their
organs for articulating words, begin with monosyllables." So much the more
must we deem the first men of the nations to have done so, for their organs were
extremely obdurate, and they had not yet heard a human voice. [Our theory]
gives us, moreover, the order in which the parts of speech arose, and consequently
the natural causes of syntax.
455 All this seems more reasonable than what Julius Caesar Scaliger and
Francisco Sanchez have said with regard to the Latin language, reasoning from
the principles of Aristotle, as if the peoples that invented the languages must
first have gone to school to him!
i 3 8 THE NEW SCIENCE
[CHAPTER V]
COROLLARIES CONCERNING THE ORIGINS OF POETIC STYLE,
EPISODE, INVERSION, RHYTHM, SONG AND VERSE
456 In this way the nations formed the poetic language, composed of
divine and heroic characters, later expressed in vulgar speech, and finally writ-
ten in vulgar characters. It was born entirely of poverty of language and need
of expression. This is proved by the first lights of poetic style, which are vivid
representations, images, similes, comparisons, metaphors, circumlocutions,
phrases explaining things by their natural properties, descriptions gathered from
their minuter or their more sensible effects, and, finally, their striking and even
their trifling collateral circumstances.
457 Episodes were born of the grossness of the heroic minds, unable to
confine themselves to those essential features of things that were to the purpose
in hand, as we see to be naturally the case with the feeble-minded and above
all with women.
458 Inversions arose from the difficulty of completing statements with
their verbs, which, as we have seen, were the last part of speech to be invented.
Thus the Greeks, who were more ingenious, used fewer inversions than the
Latins, and the Latins fewer than the Germans.
459 Prose rhythm was understood late by the writers in Greek by
Gorgias of Leontini, and in Latin by Cicero because earlier (according to
Cicero himself) they had given a rhythmic character to their orations by using
certain poetic measures. This fact will presently be very useful when we discuss
the origins of song and verse.
460 From all this it appears to have been demonstrated that, by a neces-
sity of human nature, poetic style arose before prose style; just as, by the same
necessity, the fables, or imaginative universals, arose before the rational or
philosophic universals which were formed through the medium of prose speech.
For after the poets had formed poetic speech by associating particular ideas, as
we have fully shown, the peoples went on to form prose speech by contracting
into a single word, as into a genus, the parts which poetic speech had associated.
Take for example the poetic phrase, "the blood boils in my heart/' based on a
property natural, eternal and common to all mankind. They took the blood, the
boiling and the heart, and made of them a single word, as it were a genus, called
in Greek stomachos, in Latin ira and in Italian collera. Following the same pat-
tern, hieroglyphics and heroic letters were reduced to a few vulgar letters, as
genera assimilating innumerable diverse articulate sounds; a feat requiring con-
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 139
summatc genius. By means of these vulgar genera, both of words and of letters,
the minds of the peoples grew quicker and developed powers of abstraction,
and the way was thus prepared for the coming of the philosophers who formed
intelligible genera. What has here been discussed is a small portion of the his-
tory of ideas. To such an extent has it been necessary, in seeking the origins of
letters, to deal in the same breath with those of languages!
461 Concerning song and verse we have proposed the axiom [228] that
since men arc shown to have been originally mute, they must have uttered
vowel sounds by singing, as mutes do; and later, like stammerers, they must
have uttered articulate consonantal sounds, still by singing. This first singing of
the peoples has left a great testimony in the diphthongs surviving in the lan-
guages. These must originally have been much more numerous, as the Greeks
and the French, who passed prematurely from the poetic to the vulgar age, have
left us a great many of them, as observed in the Axioms [159]. The reason for
this is that the vowels are easy to form and the consonants difficult, and, as has
been shown, the first dull-witted men were moved to utterance only by very
violent passions, which are naturally expressed in a very loud voice. And nature
brings it about that when man greatly raises his voice, he breaks into diphthongs
and song, as noted in the Axioms [229]. Thus, as shown a little above [449],
the first Greeks, in the time of their gods, formed the first spondaic heroic verse
with the diphthong pai, employing twice as many vowels as consonants.
462 Again, this first song of the peoples sprang naturally from the dif-
ficulty of the first utterances, which can be demonstrated both from cause and
from effect. From cause, since in these men the fibers of the organ for articulating
sounds were quite hard, and there were very few sounds they could make; as
on the other hand children, with very flexible fibers, born into our present plenty
of words, are observed to pronounce consonants only with the greatest difficulty
(as remarked in the Axioms [231 ] ) ; and the Chinese, whose vulgar language has
no more than three hundred articulated words, which with various modifications
of pitch and tempo correspond to their one hundred and twenty thousand hiero-
glyphs, also speak by singing. And from effect, by the contraction of words, of
which innumerable examples are observed in Italian poetry (in our Origins of
the Latin Language we set forth a great number which must have begun short
and been lengthened in the course of time); and on the other hand by redun-
dancies, because stutterers use a syllable which they can more readily utter sing-
ing in such a way as to compensate for those they find it difficult to pronounce
(as set forth in the Axioms [228]). Thus there was among us in my time an
excellent tenor with this speech defect, who, when he stumbled over a word,
would break into the sweetest song and so pronounce it. Certainly the Arabs
begin almost all their words with al-; and it is said the Huns were so called be-
cause they began all theirs with hun-. Finally, that languages began with song
is shown by what we have just said [459]: that prior to Gorgias and Cicero the
Greek and Latin prose writers used certain almost poetic rhythms, as in the
1 40 THE NEW SCIENCE
returned barbarian times the Fathers of the Roman Church did (and, it will be
found, those of the Greek Church did too), so that their prose seems made for
chanting.
463 The first verse must have sprung up (as we have recently shown it
did) conformably to the language and time of the heroes; that is, it was heroic
verse, the grandest of all, and the proper verse for heroic poetry; and it was
born of the most violent passions of fear and joy, for heroic poetry has to do only
with extremely perturbed passions. However, its spondaic origin was not from the
great fear of the Python, as vulgar tradition relates; for such perturbation rather
quickens ideas and words than retards them; whence in Latin festinans and
solicitus connote fear. No, it was because of the slowness of mind and stiffness
of tongue of the founders of the nations that heroic verse was born spondaic,
as we have shown; and from that origin it retains the characteristic of never
admitting anything but a spondee in the last foot. Later, as minds and tongues
became quicker, the dactyl was introduced. Then, as both became still more
practiced, there arose the iamb, the "quick" foot, as Horace calls it. Two axioms
[232, 233] have been set forth with regard to these origins. Finally, when mind
and tongue had reached the highest degree of celerity, there developed prose,
which, as we recently saw, speaks as it were in intelligible genera. Iambic verse
comes so near to prose that prose writers have often fallen into it inadvertently,
Thus song went on growing swifter in its verse forms in proportion as ideas and
tongues became quicker among the nations, as we have also noted in the Axioms
[238,239].
464 This philosophy is confirmed by history, which tells us of nothing
more ancient than oracles and sybils, as set forth in the Axioms [381]. Thus, to
signify that a thing was very old, there was the saying, "That is older than the
sybil"; and the sybils, of whom a good dozen have come down to us, were scat-
tered among all the first nations. There is a vulgar tradition to the effect that
the sybils sang in heroic verse, and the oracles of all nations also gave their re-
sponses in heroic verse. For that reason the Greeks called this verse Pythian from
their famous oracle of Pythian Apollo, who must have been so called from his
slaying of the serpent called Python, which, in the account related above gave
rise to the first spondaic verse. By the Latins heroic verse was called Saturnian,
as Festus attests. It must have sprung up in Italy in the age of Saturn, which
corresponds to the Golden Age of the Greeks, in which Apollo, like the other
gods, had dealings on earth with men. And Ennius, again according to Festus,
says that in this verse the fauns of Italy delivered their prophecies or oracles
(which certainly among the Greeks, as we have said, were delivered in hexam-
eters). But later the term Saturnian verses was applied to iambic senarii, per-
haps because by then it was as natural to speak in these Saturnian iambic verses
as it had previously been to speak in Saturnian heroic verses.
465 Hebraists today are divided in their opinions upon tht question
whether Hebrew? poetry is metrical or merely rhythmical. However, Joscphus,
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 141
Philo, Origen and Eusebius stand as favoring meter, and (what is most to our
present purpose) St. Jerome holds that the Book of Job, which is older than the
books of Moses, was composed in heroic verse from the beginning of the third
chapter to the end of the forty-second.
466 The Arabs, ignorant of letters, as related by the anonymous author
[Thomas Baker] of [a book on] the uncertainty of the sciences [442], preserved
their language by memorizing their poems until they overran the eastern prov-
inces of the Greek empire.
467 The Egyptians inscribed memorials of their dead in verse on columns
called syringes from sir, which means song; whence the name of the Siren,
a deity beyond doubt celebrated for her singing. Ovid says the nymph Syrinx
was equally celebrated for beauty and for song. By the same token, the Syrians
and Assyrians, whose names are likewise derived from sir, must have spoken
at first in verse.
468 Certainly the founders of Greek humanity were the theological poets,
and these were heroes and sang in heroic verse.
469 We have seen that the first authors of the Latin language were the
Salii, who were sacred poets, from whom we have the fragments of the Salian
verses, which have an air of heroic verse and are the oldest memorials of Latin
speech. The conquering ancient Romans left memorials of their triumphs in a
sort of heroic verse, like the Duello magno dirimendo, re gibus subigendis of
Lucius Aemilius Regillus, and the Pundit, fugat, prosternit maxima* legiones
of Acilius Glabrio, and others. In the fragments of the Law of the Twelve
Tables, the articles seem upon careful reflection to end for the most part in
Adonic verses, which are the concluding portions of heroic verses. Cicero must
have imitated them in his laws [De leg. II, 8], which begin thus: Deos caste
adeunto; Ptetatem adhibento. Whence the Roman custom, also mentioned by
Cicero, whereby the children learned the Law of the Twelve Tables by singing
it tanquam necessarium carmen, "as an indispensable song," to use his words.
The Cretan children, we are told by Aelian [Var. Hist. II, 39], did likewise
[with the laws of their country]. Certainly Cicero, famous as the discoverer of
prose rhythm among the Latins, as Gorgias of Leontini had been among the
Greeks (a point reflected upon above), must have shunned in his prose prose
of such weighty argument not merely verses so. sonorous, but iambic verse
as well, much as the latter resembles prose; and he guarded himself against it
even in his familiar correspondence. Hence the vulgar traditions concerning
this kind of verse must be true: the first, according to Plato, that the laws of
the Egyptians were poems of the goddess Isis; the second, according to Plutarch,
that Lycurgus gave his laws to the Spartans in verse, forbidding them in one
particular law to acquire knowledge of letters; the third, according to Maximus
of Tyre, that Jove had given the laws to Minos in verse; the fourth and last,
cited by Suidas, that Draco, who by another vulgar tradition wrote his laws in
blood, proclaimed them to the Athenians in verse.
1 42 THE NEW SCIENCE
470 We return now from laws to history. Tacitus in his account of the
customs of the ancient Germans relates that they preserved in verse the begin-
nings of their history, and Lipsius in his notes on this passage says the
same of the American Indians. The example of these two nations, of which the
first was known only to the Romans, and to them very late, and the second dis-
covered but two centuries ago by our Europeans, gives us a strong argument
for conjecturing the same of all other barbarous nations, both ancient and
modern; and, conjecture aside, the authorities tell us that the Persians among
the ancient nations, and the Chinese among those discovered in modern times,
wrote their first histories in verse. And here let this important observation be
made: that, if the peoples were established by laws, and if among all these
peoples the laws were given in verse, and if the first things of these peoples
were likewise preserved in verse, it necessarily follows that all the first peoples
were poets.
471 We resume now the subject under discussion, concerning the origins
of verse. According to Festus, the wars with Carthage were described in heroic
verse by Naevius even before Ennius's time; and Livius Andronicus, the first
Latin writer, wrote the Romanidae, a heroic poem containing the annals of the
ancient Romans. In the returned barbarian times the Latin historians were
heroic poets, like Gunther, William of Apulia and others. We have seen that
the first writers in the modern languages of Europe were versifiers; and in
Silesia, a province almost entirely inhabited by peasants, the people are born
poets. And generally the German language preserves its heroic origins intact
even to excess and this is the reason, though Adam Rechenberg is unaware
of it, for the fact he attests, that Greek compound words can be happily ren-
dered in German, especially in poetry. Bernegger compiled a catalog of these
words, and Georg Christoph Peisker has since been at pains to extend it in his
Index . . . fro graecae et germanicae linguae analogia. The ancient Latin lan-
guage has also left us many examples of compounds formed by combining whole
words; and of these compounds, as of their right, the poets have continued to
make use. For it must have been a common property of all the first languages
that, as has been shown, they were furnished first with nouns and only later
with verbs, and so they had supplied the lack of verbs by putting nouns to-
gether. These must be the informing principles of what [G. D.] Morhofen has
written in his Unterricht von der teutschen Sprache und Pocsic. Let this stand
as a proof of the opinion which we stated in the Axioms [153]: that "if the
scholars of the German language apply themselves to seeking its origins by
these principles they will make marvelous discoveries."
472 All that has here been reasoned out seems clearly to confute the
common error of the grammarians, who say that prose speech came first and
speech in verse afterward. And within the origins of poetry, as they have here
been disclosed, we have found the origins of languages and letters.
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 143
[CHAPTER VI]
THE OTHER COROLLARIES ANNOUNCED AT THE BEGINNING
[OF CHAPTER IV]
473 Along with this first birth of characters and languages was also
born law, which the Latins called ious and the ancient Greeks diaion f which we
explained above [398] as derived from Dios and meaning celestial. Thence
came the Latin phrases sub dio and sub love, both meaning "under the sky/'
Later, as Plato says in the Cratylus, by refinement of speech, diaion became
di\aion. For the heavens were observed as the aspect of Jove by all the gentile
nations the world over, to receive therefrom their laws in the auspices which
they considered to be his divine admonishments or commands. And this shows
that all the nations were born in the persuasion of divine providence.
474 To enumerate: (i) For the Chaldeans the sky was Jove in that they
believed they could foretell the future by the aspects and movements of the
stars. The two sciences of these matters were called astronomy and astrology,
the former dealing with the laws of the stars and the latter (m the [restricted]
sense of judicial astrology) with their language. In the Roman laws, judicial
astrologers were still called Chaldeans.
475 (2) For the Persians too the sky was Jove, for it signified for them
things hidden from men. Those who were learned in the science of these things
were called mages, and the word magic was applied to two sciences, one the
legitimate natural science of the marvelous hidden forces of nature, the other
the illicit science of the supernatural; in the latter sense a mage was a wizard.
The mages used the rod (the lituus of the Roman augurs) to describe the circles
of the astronomers; later the wizards made use of the rod and circles in their
witchcraft. For the Persians the sky was the temple of Jove; and Cyrus, because
this was his religion, destroyed the temples built by the Greeks.
476 (3) For the Egyptians too, Jove was the sky, for they believed that
the heavens influenced sublunar affairs and announced future events. Hence
they believed they could direct celestial influences by casting their images at the
right time, and to this day they have preserved a vulgar art of divination.
477 (4) To the Greeks Jove was likewise the sky, for they considered
as of celestial origin the theorems and mathemata we have mentioned elsewhere
[391]. These they believed to be divine or sublime things to be contemplated by
144 THE NEW SCIENCE
the bodily eyes and to be observed (in the sense of obeyed) as laws of Jove. From
mathemata comes the term mathematicians as applied in the Roman laws to
the judicial astrologers.
478 (5) As for the Romans, the verse of Ennius quoted above [450]
is well known: As f ice hoc sublime cadens, quern omnes invocant lovem. The
pronoun hoc should here be taken, as we have said, as anding for coclum. The
Romans also used the phrase templa cocli, as we have said, for the regions of
the sky marked out by the augurs for taking the auspices. Thus the Latin
templum came to signify any place which is free on every side and has an un-
obstructed prospect. Hence extcmplo, meaning "immediately." It is with this
old sense in mind that Vergil calls the sea neptunia templa.
479 (6) The ancient Germans, as Tacitus narrates, worshiped their gods
in holy places which he calls luci ct nemora. These must have been clearings
leveled in the midst of the forest. The Church had great trouble in weaning
them from this practice, as we gather from the councils of Nantes and Braga in
Burchard's collection of Decreta; and even today traces remain of it in Lapland
and Livonia.
480 (7) The Peruvian Indians, it has been learned, called their god
simply "the sublime," and their open-air temples were hills up which one
climbed on either of two sides by very long stairways; and all their magnificence
consists in their height. Thus everywhere the magnificence of temples is meas-
ured by their disproportionate height. The pediment of temples we find in
Pausanias was called aetos, which is very much to our purpose, for it means
"eagle." The forests were cleared to afford a prospect for observing whence came
the auspices of the eagles, who fly higher than all other birds. Perhaps for that
reason the pediments were called pinnae templorum, which must later have
prompted the term pinnae murorum, because on the confines of these first
temples of the world the walls of the first cities were erected, as we shall see
later. And finally in architecture what we now call the merlons or battlements
were called eagles.
481 But the Hebrews worshiped the true All Highest, who is above the
heavens, in the enclosure of the tabernacle; and Moses, wherever the people of
God extended their conquests, gave orders that the sacred groves inclosing the
luci that Tacitus speaks of should be burned.
482 From the foregoing we gather that the first laws everywhere were
the divine laws of Jove. So ancient in origin is the usage which has come down
in the languages of many Christian nations of taking heaven for God. We
Italians, for example, say voglia il ciclo, "may heaven plsase," and spero al cielo,
"I hope to heaven," meaning God in both expressions. The Spanish have the
same usage. The French say bleu for "blue," and since blue is a term of sense
perception they must have meant by bleu the sky; and, just as the gentile na-
tions used "sky" for Jove, the French must have used bleu for God in that im-
pious oath of theirs, moure bleul, "God's death!"; and they still say parbleul,
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 145
"by God!" And this may serve as an example of the Mental Dictionary proposed
in the Axioms [162], which has been discussed above.
II
483 The need for certainty of ownership was a large part of the necessity
for the invention of characters and names in the native sense of houses branching
into many families, which, with perfect propriety, were called gentes. Thus
[Hermes or] Mercury Trismegistus, a poetic character of the first founders of
the Egyptians, as we have shown, was their inventor of laws and letters. From
this Mercury, who was likewise held to be the god of trade, the Italians by a
wonderful parallel in thought and expression lasting to our own time took
the verb mercare, "to mark," in the sense of branding with letters or insignia the
cattle or other merchandise they have for sale, to distinguish and identify the
owners.
Ill
484 Such are the first origins of family coats-of-arms and hence of medals
and coins. From these devices, employed first for private and later for public
needs, came the learned emblems for pleasure's sake. These latter, by a sort of
divination [on the part of the scholars], were called heroic; but they have to be
explained by mottoes, for their meanings are [now merely] analogical; whereas
the natural heroic emblems were such from lack of mottoes, and spoke forth
in their very muteness. Hence they were in their own right the best emblems,
for they carried their meaning in themselves. For example, three ears of grain,
or three scythe-swinging motions, naturally signified three years. And so it
came about that names and characters were interchangeable, and names and
natures came to mean the same thing, as we have said above.
485 Now, beginning all over again with family arms, in the returned bar-
barian times the nations again became mute in vulgar speech. For this reason
no notice has come down to us of the Spanish, French, Italian or other lan-
guages of those times, and Greek and Latin were known only by the priests,
so that among the French clerc was used in the sense of a literate man, and on
the other hand the Italians, as we see from a fine passage in Dante, used laico,
"layman," for a man ignorant of letters. Indeed even among the clergy ignorance
was so dense that we read documents signed by bishops with the simple sign
of the cross because they did not know how to write their own names. And even
the learned prelates could write but little, as is shown by the diligent Father
Mabillon in his work De re diplomatica , with its copperplate facsimiles of the
signatures of bishops and archbishops to the acts of the councils of those bar-
barous days. They can be seen to have been written with letters more misshapen
and clumsy than those of the most untaught simpleton of today. Yet for the
most part the chancellors of the realms of Europe were such prelates, as was
the case with the three Chancellor Archbishops of the Empire, one each for Ger-
I 4 6 THE NEW SCIENCE
man, French and Italian; and from these, because of the way they had of
writing their letters with such irregular shapes, must have come the phrase
"chancellors script." Because of this scarcity of literate men an English law was
decreed according to which a criminal under sentence of death who knew his
letters would be spared as "excelling in art" [excellent in ane non debet won].
Perhaps from this the term "lettered" came later to signify "learned."
486 Because of this same scarcity of men who could write, we do not
find a single wall in ancient houses without some device carved upon it. More-
over, the barbarous Latins applied the term terrae prcsa to a farm with its
boundaries, and the Italians called it podere with the same idea the Latins had
in calling it praedium, for the lands brought under cultivation were the first
booty [prey] of the world. In the Law of the Twelve Tables estates were called
mancipta, and those under real-estate bond (principally to the public treasury)
were called praedes or mancipes, and the so-called real servitudes were referred
to as iura praediorum. The Spanish moreover used the word prenda for bold
enterprises, because the first bold enterprises of the world were the taming and
cultivation of the land, which we shall find to have been the greatest of all the
labors of Hercules. Again, a coat-of-arms was called by the Italians an ensign
in the sense of a thing signifying, whence the Italian verb insegnare, "to teach."
They also call it divisa, "device," because the ensigns were used as signs of
the first division of the fields, which had previously been used in common by
all mankind. The originally real terms [boundary posts] of these fields later
became the vocal terms of the scholastics; that is, significant words serving as
terms of propositions. Among the American Indians, as we have seen above,
the hieroglyphs for distinguishing their families have a similar use as terms.
487 The conclusion to be drawn from the foregoing is that in the time
of mute nations the great need answered by ensigns was that for certainty of
ownership. Later they became public ensigns in time of peace, and from these
were derived the medals, which, with the introduction of warfare, were found
suitable for military insignia. The latter have their primary use as hieroglyphs,
inasmuch as wars are waged for the most part between nations differing in
speech and hence mute in relation to each other. Striking confirmation of what
has been so far reasoned out is to be found in the example of the eagle on the
scepter; for this symbol was used alike by the Egyptians, the Etruscans, the
Romans and the English, who still use it as an ornament of their royal arms.
This by a uniformity of ideas, for in all these nations, divided though they are
by immense tracts of land and sea, the symbol was meant to signify that the
realms had their origins from the first divine kingdoms of Jove by virtue of his
auspices. Finally, when commerce by means of coined money was introduced,
it was found that these medals were suitable for use as coins, which indeed
were for that reason called monetae from monendo by the Latins, just as in-
segnare came from insegna among the Italians. In like fashion from the Greek
nomos came nomisma t as Aristotle tells us; and perhaps from it too came the
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 147
Latin numus, which the best authorities write thus with one m. In French too
law is called lot, and the metal for coins, aloi. These terms can have had no
other origin than the law or right signified by the hieroglyph, which is pre-
cisely the use of medals. All of which is strikingly confirmed by the following
names of coins: ducat from ducendo, which is said of captains; soldo, whence
soldier; and scudo, a defensive arm, which originally meant the escutcheon or
field of family arms, which in the beginning was the tilled land of each father in
the time of the families, as will be shown later. This will shed light on the
many ancient medals on which we find an altar, a lituus (the augur's rod for
taking the auspices, as noted above), or a tripod (from which the oracle spoke,
as is indicated by the phrase dictum ex tripode for the word of the oracle).
488 To this sort of medals must have belonged the wings which the
Greeks in their fables attached to all the physical objects signifying the heroic
constitutions based on the auspices. Thus Idanthyrsus, among the real hiero-
glyphs with which he answered Darius, sent a bird. And the Roman patricians
in all their heroic contests with the plebs (as clearly appears in Roman history)
for the preservation of their heroic rights maintained as law that the auspices
were theirs. Similarly in the returned barbarism we find noble arms bearing
plumed helmets, and in the West Indies only the nobles are adorned with
feathers.
t
IV
489 The name lous, "J ve >" when contracted to ius, must have meant
first of all the fat of the victims owed to Jove, as we have said above. Similarly
in the returned barbarism the term canon was applied both to ecclesiastical law
and to the payment made by the fief-holder to his immediate master; perhaps
because the first fiefs were introduced by the ecclesiastics, who, not being
able to cultivate them themselves, gave the fields of the Church to others to
till. These two observations are corroborated by the two above mentioned: the
Greek usage by which nomos means law and nomisma means coin, and the
French usage by which lot and aloi have the same meanings. Precisely in
the same way that was called lous optimus, for "Jove most strong," which by the
force of the thunderbolt gave a beginning to divine authority in its primary
sense, which was that of ownership, as we have said above, for all things were
of Jove.
490 That truth of rational metaphysics concerning the omnipresence of
God, which had been taken in the false sense of poetic metaphysics: . . . lot/is
omnia plena, "all things are full of Jove," conferred human authority on those
giants who had occupied the first empty lands of the world, in the same sense
of ownership. In Roman law this was certainly called ius optimum, but its
original meaning was quite different from that in which it was used in later
times. For it had at first the sense defined by Cicero in a golden passage in his
orations: "ownership of real estate subject to no encumbrance private or public."
148 THE NEW SCIENCE
This ius was called optimum in the same sense of "strongest," as not having
been weakened by any extraneous encumbrance. For right was reckoned by
strength in the first times of the world, as we shall see. This ownership must
have belonged to the fathers in the family state, and was consequently the nat-
ural ownership which had to precede the civil. As cities were formed by uniting
families based on this best ownership (called in Greek difaion ariston), they
were originally aristocratic, as we shall see later. Springing from the same
origin among the Latins, the so-called commonwealths of the optimates were
also called commonwealths of the few, because they were made up of those "few
whom just Jupiter loved," pauci quos aequus amavit Jupiter. In their heroic
contests with the plebs, the heroes maintained their heroic constitutions by
means of the divine auspices. In mute times they signified their constitutions
by the bird of Idanthyrsus, by the wings of the Greek fables; and finally in the
articulate language of the Roman patricians, by declaring "the auspices are
ours."
491 Jove with his bolts, from which the most important auspices were
drawn, had struck down the first giants and driven them under the earth to
live in the caves of the mountains. By striking them down in this fashion he
had given them the opportunity of becoming lords of the fields of those lands
where they found themselves settled in hiding, and thereby they became the
lords in the first commonwealths; and because of this ownership, [when they
approved or authorized anything] each of them was said to become its jundus
in the sense of its auctor. From their private authority within the family came,
with the union of the families, as we shall see, the civil or public authority of
their ruling heroic senates, as set forth in the medal (of which there are so many
examples among those of the Greek commonwealths reproduced in Goltz) de-
picting three human thighs united in the center with the soles of the feet on
the circumference. This signifies the ownership of the fields of each region or
territory or district of each commonwealth. This is now called eminent domain
and is signified by the hieroglyph of the pome which today surmounts the
crowns of civil powers, as will be set forth later. The [fact that the legs m
the medal are] three [in number] lends particular strength to this interpreta-
tion, as the Greeks were accustomed to express the superlative by the number
three, as the French now say trts for "very." By the same figure of speech, Jove's
thunderbolt was called three-furrowed because it furrowed the air most force-
fully. (Thus the idea of furrowing was perhaps first applied to air, then earth
and finally water.) Similarly Neptune's trident was so called because, as we shall
see, it was a most powerful hook for biting or grappling ships; and Cerberus
was called three-throated as having an enormous gullet.
492 What we have said here of family arms is to be preferred to our
discussion of their origins in the first edition of this work, though that is the
third passage in that edition on whose account we do not regret its publica-
tion.
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 149
V
493 It follows from all this that Grotius, Selden and Pufendorf, the three
princes of the natural law of nations, should have begun their expositions from
the letters and laws which Hermes Trismegistus devised for the Egyptians, from
the characters and names of the Greeks, and from the names which signify
both gentes and laws to the Romans. And they should have gone on to unfold
it by a well-informed interpretation of the hieroglyphs and fables as the medals
of the times in which the gentile nations were founded; and thus to ascertain
their customs by a metaphysical criticism of the founders of the nations, which
should have given the first light to the philological criticism of their writers,
who did not come forth until more than a thousand years after the nations had
been founded.
[CHAPTER VII]
FINAL COROLLARIES CONCERNING THE LOGIC OF THE LEARNED
I
494 The results so far reached by the aid of this poetic logic concerning
the origins of languages do justice to their first creators. They were rightly re-
garded as sages in all subsequent times because they gave natural and proper
names to things, so that, as we saw above, among the Greeks and Latins name
and nature meant the same thing.
II
495 The first founders of humanity applied themselves to a sensory
topics, by which they brought together those properties or qualities or relations
of individuals and species which were so to speak concrete, and from these
created their poetic genera.
Ill
496 So that we may truly say that the first age of the world occupied itself
with the primary operation of the human mind.
IV
497 And first it began to hew out topics, which is an art of regulating
well the primary operation of our mind by noting the commonplaces that must
all be run over in order to know all there is in a thing that one desires to know
well, that is, completely.
1 50 THE NEW SCIENCE
V
498 Providence gave good guidance to human affairs when it aroused
human minds first to topics rather than to criticism, for acquaintance with things
must come before judgment of them. Topics has the function of making minds
inventive, as criticism has that of making them exact. And in those first times
all things necessary to human life had to be invented, and invention is the prop-
erty of genius. In fact, whoever gives the matter some thought will observe that
not only the necessaries of life but the useful, comfortable, pleasing and even
luxurious and superfluous, had already been invented in Greece before the
advent of the philosophers, as we shall show later when we speak of the age of
Homer. On this point we have set forth an axiom above [215]: namely, that
"children are extraordinarily gifted in imitation," that "poetry is nothing but
imitation," and that "the arts are only imitations of nature and consequently
in a certain sense real poetry." Thus the first peoples, who were the children of
the human race, founded first the world of the arts; then the philosophers, who
came a long time afterwards and so may be regarded as the old men of the
nations, founded the world of the sciences, thereby making humanity complete.
VI
499 This history of human ideas is strikingly confirmed by the history
of philosophy itself. For the first kind of crude philosophy used by men was
autopsia or the evidence of the senses. It was later made use of by Epicurus, for
he, as a philosopher of the senses, was satisfied with the mere exhibition of
things to the evidence of the senses. And the senses of the first poetic nations
were extremely lively, as we have seen in our account of the origins of poetry.
Then came Aesop, or the moral philosophers whom we would call vulgar. (As
we have noted above, Aesop preceded the Seven Sages of Greece.) Aesop taught
by example and, since he lived in what was still the poetic age, he took his ex-
amples from fictitious similitudes. (The good Menenius Agrippa used one
such to reduce the rebellious Roman plebs to obedience.) An example of this
sort, or better still a true one, is even now more persuasive to the ignorant crowd
than the most impeccable reasoning from maxims. After Aesop came Socrates,
who introduced dialectic, employing induction of several certain things related
to the doubtful thing in question. Before Socrates, medicine, by induction of
observations, had given us Hippocrates, prince of all doctors both in merit and
in precedence, who earned the immortal eulogy: "He deceives no one nor is
deceived by any" (Nee jallit quenquam, nee falsus ab ullo esi). Mathematics
by the unitive [inductive] method called synthetic had made, in Plato's time,
its greatest progress in the Italian school of Pythagoras, as we can see from
the Timaeus. Thus by virtue of this unitive method, Athens at the time of
Socrates and Plato was resplendent in all the arts for which human genius can
be admired poetry, eloquence and history as well as music, casting in bronze,
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 151
painting, sculpture and architecture. Then came Aristotle and Zeno. The former
taught the syllogism, a method which displays the universals in their particulars
rather than putting together the particulars to form universals. The latter
taught the sorites, which, like the method of modern philosophers, makes minds
subtle but not sharp. Neither of them yielded anything else of note to the ad-
vantage of the human race. Hence with great reason Bacon, great alike as
philosopher and statesman, proposes, commends and illustrates the inductive
method in his [Novum\ Organum, and is still followed by the English with
great profit in experimental philosophy.
VII
500 This history of human ideas clearly convicts of their common error
all those who, under the influence of the mistaken popular belief in the super-
lative wisdom of the ancients, have held that Minos, the first lawgiver of the
gentile nations, Theseus at Athens, Lycurgus at Sparta, and Romulus and other
kings at Rome, established universal laws. For the most ancient laws, we ob-
serve, were conceived as commanding or forbidding one individual alone; only
later were they given general application (so incapable of universals were the
first peoples!); and furthermore they were not conceived at all before the acts
occurred that made them necessary. The law of Tullus Hostilius in the case
against Horatius is nothing else but the penalty decreed by the duumvirs, ap-
pointed for that purpose by the king, against the illustrious culprit. Livy calls it
lex horrendi carmtms; it is one of the laws which Draco wrote in blood, and
sacred history calls them leges sangutnis. Livy's observation that the king did
not wish to proclaim the law, in order not to be responsible for such a harsh and
unpopular verdict, is quite ridiculous. For the king himself prescribed the
formula of condemnation to the duumvirs, so that the latter could not have
absolved Horatius even had they found him innocent. Livy is here not at all
clear, for he did not understand that in the heroic senates, which were aristo-
cratic as we shall see, the kings had no other power than that of creating duum-
virs to act as commissioners to adjudicate public suits, and that the peoples of
the heroic cities consisted of nobles only, to whom the condemned could appeal.
501 To return now to the point, that law of Tullus is in fact one of the
so-called examples, in the sense of exemplary punishments, which must have
been the first examples used by human reason. (This agrees with what we
learned from Aristotle above in the Axioms [269]: that "in the heroic common-
wealths there were no laws concerning private wrongs or injuries.") Thus first
came real examples and later the reasoned ones of logic and rhetoric. But when
intelligible universals had come to be understood, that essential property of
law that it must be universal was recognized, and the maxim of juris-
prudence was established that we must judge by the laws, not by examples
(legibus, non exemplis, cst iudicandum).
[SECTION III]
[POETIC MORALS]
[CHAPTER I]
POETIC MORALS AND THE ORIGINS OF THE VULGAR VIRTUES
TAUGHT BY RELIGION THROUGH THE INSTITUTION OF MATRIMONY
502 The metaphysics of the philosophers, by means of the idea of God,
fulfills its first task, that of clarifying the human mind, which needs logic so
that with clear and distinct ideas it may form its conclusions, and descend
therewith to cleanse the heart* of man with morality. Just so the metaphysics of
the poet giants, who had warred against heaven in their atheism, conquered
them by the terror of Jove, whom they knew as the wielder of the thunderbolt.
And it humbled not only their bodies but their minds as well, by creating in
them this frightful idea of Jove. (The idea was of course not formed by rea-
soning, for they were not yet capable of that, but by the senses, which, however
false in the matter, were true enough in form which was the logic conformable
to such natures as theirs.) This idea, by making them god-fearing, was the
source of their poetic morality. From this nature of human things arose the
eternal property that minds to make good use of the knowledge of God must
humble themselves, just as on the other hand arrogance will lead them to
atheism, for atheists become giants in spirit, ready to say with Horace: Caelum
if sum pettmus stultitia, "heaven itself we assail in our folly."
503 Such god-fearing giants Plato certainly recognizes as represented by
the Polyphemus of Homer. And we find support in what Homer himself tells
of this same giant, in the passage where he makes him say that an augur who
had lived at one time among the Cyclopes, had predicted the woes which he
later suffered at the hands of Ulysses; for augurs certainly cannot live among
atheists. Thus poetic morality began with piety, which was ordained by provi-
dence to found the nations, for among them all piety is proverbially held to be
the mother of all the moral, economic and civil virtues. Religion alone has the
power to make us practice virtue, as philosophy is fit rather for discussing it.
And piety sprang from religion, which properly defined is the fear of divinity.
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 153
The heroic origin of the word religion was preserved among the Latins by those
who derived it from religando, binding, with reference to those fetters with
which Tityus and Prometheus were bound on the mountain crags to have their
hearts and entrails devoured by the eagle, that is, by the frightful religion of
the auspices of Jove. Hence came the eternal property among all nations, that
piety is instilled in children by the fear of some divinity,
504 Moral virtue began, as it must, with effort. For the giants, confined
under the mountains by the frightful religion of the thunderbolts, learned to
restrain their bestial habit of wandering wild through the great forest of the
earth, and acquired the contrary custom of remaining hidden and settled in
their fields. Hence they later became the founders of the nations and the lords
of the first commonwealths, as we have indicated above and as we shall set
forth more fully further on. This has been preserved by vulgar tradition as one
of the great benefits conferred on the human race by Heaven when it reigned
on earth through the religion of the auspices. And hence came Jove's title of
stayer or stablisher, as we have said above. And with this effort likewise the
virtue of moderation began to show itself among them, restraining their bestial
lust from finding its satisfaction in the sight of heaven, of which they had a
mortal terror. So it came about that each of them would drag one woman into
his cave and would keep her there in perpetual company for the duration of
their lives. Thus the act of human love was performed under cover, in hiding,
that is to say, in shame; and they began to feel that sense of shame which
Socrates described as the color of virtue. And this, after religion, is the second
bond that keeps nations united, even as shamelessness and impiety destroy them.
505 Such was the origin of marriage, which is a chaste carnal union con-
summated under the fear of some divinity. We made this the second principle
of our Science, with its source in our first principle, which is divine providence.
It arose accompanied by three solemnities.
506 The first of these solemnities was the auspices of Jove, taken from
the thunderbolts by which the giants were induced to observe them. From this
sors or lot [signified by the auspices], marriage was defined among the Romans
as omnis vitac consortium, "a lifelong sharing of lot," and the husband and wife
were called consortes or "lot-sharers." And to this day Italian girls when they
marry are said to take up their lot, prendcr sortc. In this determinate way and
in this first time of the world arose the law of nations that the wife follows the
public religion of her husband. For husbands shared their first human ideas
with their wives, beginning with the idea of a divinity of theirs which com-
pelled them to drag their women into their caves; and thus even this vulgar
metaphysics began to know the human mind in God. And from this first point
of all human things gentile men began to praise the gods, in the ancient Roman
legal sense of citing or calling them by name; whence the phrase laudarc auc-
tores, bidding men to cite the gods as authors of whatever they themselves did.
Such must have been the praises which men owed to the gods.
I 5 4 THE NEW SCIENCE
507 From this most ancient origin of marriage came the custom by which
women enter the families and houses of the men they marry. This natural cus-
tom of the gentile nations was preserved by the Romans, among whom women
were regarded as daughters of their husbands and sisters of their children. Thus
not merely must marriage have been from the beginning a union with one
woman only, as it continued to be among the Romans (a custom Tacitus ad-
mires in the ancient Germans, who like the Romans kept intact the institu-
tional origins of their nations, and who give us ground for conjecturing similar
beginnings for all others), but it must also have been a union to last for life,
as indeed remained the custom among a great many peoples. Hence among
the Romans marriage was defined, with this property in view, as individua
vitae consuetudo, "unbroken companionship of life" [Inst. 1.9.1]; and divorce
was introduced very late among them.
508 Proceeding from the auspices thus taken from the thunderbolts of
Jove, fabulous Greek history describes Hercules (a [poetic] character of founders
of nations, as we saw above and as we shall observe more closely) as born of
Alcmena by a thunderbolt of Jove. Another great hero of Greece is Bacchus,
born of thunderstruck Semele. This was the first reason for which the heroes
called themselves sons of Jove; the assertion was a truth of the senses for them,
persuaded as they were that all things were the work of the gods, as we have
reasoned above. And this is the meaning of that passage of Roman history in
which, to the patricians who said in the heroic contests that the auspices were
theirs, the plebs replied that the fathers of whom Romulus had composed the
senate, and from whom the patricians traced their descent, non esse caclo demis-
sos t "were not descended from heaven"; for if this does not mean that the fathers
were not heroes, it is hard to see how the reply is appropriate. Hence, to signify
that connubium or the right to contract solemn nuptials, whose chief solemnity
was the auspices of Jove, was the prerogative of the heroes, they represented
noble Love as winged and blindfolded in token of his modesty, and called him
Eros, a name similar to heros, "hero," which was their own. And they created
a winged Hymen too, the son of Urania, whose name is from ouranos, "heaven,"
and signifies "she who contemplates the heavens" to take thence the auspices.
Urania must have been the first of the Muses; she was defined by Homer, as we
have noted above, as "the science of good and evil"; and she too, like the rest,
was conceived as winged because she belonged to the heroes, as we have set forth
above. We have also explained above the historic sense of the saying about her:
A love pnncipium musae. She and the other Muses were held to be daughters of
Jove (for religion gave birth to all the arts of humanity, o which Apollo, held
to be principally the god of divination, is the presiding deity), and they "sing"
in that sense of canerc and cantarc which means "foretell" to the Latins.
509 The second solemnity is the requirement that the women be veiled
in token of that sense of shame that gave rise to the first marriages in the world.
This custom has Been preserved by all nations; among the Latins it is reflected
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM i 55
in the very name "nuptials," for nuptiae is from nubendo, which means "to
cover." And since the returned barbarian times maidens have been called vir-
gins in capillo, "in [uncovered] hair," in distinction from married women who
go about veiled.
510 The third solemnity also preserved by the Romans was a certain
show of force in taking a wife, recalling the real violence with which the giants
dragged the first wives into their caves. And by analogy with the first lands
which the giants had occupied by taking physical possession of them, properly
wedded wives were said to be manucaptae, "taken by force."
511 Out of solemnized marriages the theological poets fashioned another
divine character, second to that of Jove; namely, Juno, the second divinity of the
so-called gentes maiorcs. She is both wife and sister of Jove, because the first
lawful or solemn marriages (called lawful from the solemnity of the auspices of
Jove) must have taken place between brothers and sisters. She is queen of gods
and men because the kingdoms were afterwards born of these legitimate mar-
riages. And she is fully clothed, as we observe in statues and medals, to signify
modesty.
512 The heroic Venus too, called pronuba in her character of patron
goddess of solemn marriage, covers her private parts with the girdle, which ef-
feminate poets later embroidered with all the incentives to lust. But later, when
the austere history of the auspices had become corrupt, Venus was believed to
have lain with men, even as Jove with women, and to have conceived Aeneas by
Anchises, for Aeneas was born under the auspices of this Venus. And to this
Venus are attributed the swans shared by her with Apollo who sing in that
sense of canere or cantare which means dwinari, "to foretell." Taking the shape
of one of these swans Jove lies with Leda, signifying that under the auspices of
Jove Leda conceives the egg-born Castor, Pollux and Helen.
513 Juno is called jugalis, "of the yoke," with reference to the yoke of
solemn matrimony for which it was called conjugium and the married pair
conjuges. She is also known as Lucina, who brings the offspring into the light;
not natural light, for that is shared by the offspring of slaves, but the civil light
by reason of which the nobles are called illustrious. And she is jealous with a
political jealousy, that from which the Romans down to the 309th year of Rome
excluded the plebs from connublum or lawful marriage. By the Greeks however
she was called Hera, whence the name the heroes gave themselves, for they were
born of solemn nuptials, of which Juno was the goddess, and hence generated
in noble love (which is the meaning of Eros), which was identical with Hymen.
And the heroes must have been so called in the sense of "lords of the families" in
distinction from the famuli, who as we shall see were in effect slaves. Heri had
this same meaning in Latin, whence hcreditas for "inheritance," for which
the native Latin word had been familia. With such an origin, hercditas must
have meant a despotic sovereignty, and by the law of the Twelve Tables there
was reserved to the family fathers a sovereign power of testamentary disposition,
i 5 6 THE NEW SCIENCE
in the article [5.3] : Uti paterfamilias super pecunia tutelave suae rei legassit, ita
ius esto, "As the family father has disposed concerning his property and the
guardianship of his estate, so let it be binding." The disposing was generally
called legare, which is a prerogative of sovereigns; thus the heir becomes a
"legate" [legatee] who in inheriting represents the defunct paterfamilias, and
the children no less than the slaves were included in the words rei suae and
pecunia. All of which proves only too conclusively the monarchic power that the
fathers had had over their families in the state of nature. This they were bound
to retain and we shall see later that they did in fact retain it in the state of the
heroic cities. These must in origin have been aristocratic commonwealths, that
is, commonwealths of lords, in origin, for the fathers still retained their power
even in the popular commonwealths. All these matters will later be discussed at
length. < .
514 The goddess Juno imposes great labors on the Theban, that is the
Greek, Hercules. (For every ancient gentile nation had a Hercules as its founder,
as we have said above in the Axioms [196].) This signifies that piety and mar-
riage form the school wherein are learned the first rudiments of all the great
virtues. And Hercules, with the favor of Jove under whose auspices he was
begotten, surmounts all the difficulties. He was therefore called Heracles, that is
Her as j(leos, the glory of [Hera or] Juno. And if glory be properly esteemed, as
Cicero defines it, as "widespread fame for meritorious acts on behalf of the
human race," how great a glory must it have been for the Herculeses to have
founded the nations by their labors! But when these severe significations had
been obscured by time and customs had become effeminate, Juno's sterility was
taken as natural and she was held to be jealous only of an adulterous Jove.
Hercules was then made a bastard son of Jove, who by Jove's favor and in de-
spite of Juno had carried out all his labors. Thus he became not Juno's glory but
her complete disgrace (by a[n interpretation of his] name quite contrary to the
facts), and Juno was made a mortal enemy of virtue. [Originally] the hieroglyph
or fable of Juno hanging in the air with a rope around her neck and her hands
tied by another rope and with two heavy stones tied to her feet, had signified the
sanctity of marriage. (Juno was in the air to signify the auspices essential to
solemn nuptials, and for the same reason Iris was made her handmaiden and the
peacock with its rainbow tail was assigned to her. She had a rope about her neck
to recall the violence used by the giants on the first wives. Her hands were bound
in token of the subjection of wives to their husbands, later represented among
all nations by the more refined symbol of the wedding ring. The heavy stones
tied to her feet denoted the stability of marriage, for which Vergil calls solemn
matrimony conjugium stabile.) But now this fable was taken as representing a
cruel punishment inflicted by an adulterous Jove, and, with the unworthy inter-
pretations bestowed upon it by later times with corrupted customs, it has greatly
exercised the mythplogists ever since.
515 For these very reasons Plato interpreted the Greek fables as Manetho
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM x 57
had the Egyptian hieroglyphs, observing on the one hand the incongruity of gods
having such customs, and on the other the congruity [of the fables] with his
own ideas. Into the fable of Jove he intruded the idea of his ether which flows
and penetrates everywhere, on the strength of the phrase "all things are full of
Jove" (lovis omnia plena), as we have said above. But the Jove of the
theological poets dwelt no higher than the mountains and the region of
the air in which lightning is generated. Into the fable of Juno he intruded the
idea of breathable air; but Juno has no offspring by Jove, whereas ether and air
produce everything. (So far were the theological poets from understanding by
this fable that truth of physics which teaches that the universe is filled with
ether, or that truth of metaphysics which demonstrates the omnipresence at-
tributed to God by the natural theologians!) Above poetic heroism Plato raised
his own philosophic heroism, placing the hero above man as well as beast; for
the beast is the slave of his passions, and man, in the middle of the scale, strug-
gles with his passions, while the hero at will commands his passions; and thus
the heroic nature is midway between the human and the divine. And Plato
held that the noble Love of the poets (called Eros from the same root as heros,
"hero") was fittingly imagined as winged and blindfolded, and plebeian Love as
without wings or blindfold, to set forth the two loves, divine and bestial; the
one blind to the things of the senses, the other intent upon them; the one rising
on wings to the contemplation of intelligible things, the other, for lack of wings,
falling back upon sensible things. Ganymede, borne off to heaven by an eagle of
Jove, and thus signifying to the austere poets the contemplator of Jove's auspices,
became in corrupt times an ignoble pleasure of Jove; but Plato by a fine conceit
took him for the metaphysical contemplative, who through contemplation of
supreme being by the method he calls unitive has achieved union with Jove.
516 In this way, piety and religion made the first men naturally (i)
prudent, by taking counsel from the auspices of Jove; (2) just both in that first
justice toward Jove (who, as we have seen, gave his name to the just) and in
that toward men, by not meddling in one another's affairs, as Polyphemus tells
Ulysses of the giants scattered among the caves of Sicily (which, though it ap-
pears to be justice, was in fact savagery); and moreover (3) temperate, con-
tent with one woman for their lifetime. And, as we shall see later, piety and re-
ligion likewise made them (4) strong, industrious, and magnanimous. Such
were the virtues of the golden age, which was not, as effeminate poets later pic-
tured it, an age in which pleasure was law. For in the golden age of the the-
ological poets, men insensible to every refinement of wearisome reflection took
pleasure only in what was lawful and [regarded as lawful only what was] use-
ful, as is still the case, we observe, with peasants. (The heroic origin of the Latin
verb iuvare is preserved in the expression iuvat ["it helps"] for "it is pleasant/')
Nor were the philosophers right in imagining it as an age in which men read
the eternal laws of justice in the bosom of Jove, for at first they read in the aspect
of the sky the laws dictated to them by the thunderbolts. In conclusion, the vir-
i 5 8 THE NEW SCIENCE
tucs of that first time were such as we found [100] admired by the Scythians,
who would fix a knife in the ground and adore it as a god, and thus justify their
killings; thaj is, they were virtues of the senses, with an admixture of religion
and savage cruelty, whose affinity may still be observed among witches, as we
noted in the Axioms [190].
517 From this early morality of the superstitious and cruel gentile world
came the custom of sacrificing human victims to the gods. This we have from
the most ancient Phoenicians, among whom, when some great calamity was
imminent, such as war, famine or pestilence, the kings sacrificed their own chil-
dren to placate the wrath of heaven, as Philo of Byblus narrates. Such sacrifices
of children were regularly offered to Saturn, according to Quintus Curtius. Jus-
tin says the custom was continued by the Carthaginians, a people undoubtedly
of Phoenician origin (as we shall observe), and was practiced by them down
to their latest times. This is confirmed by Ennius in the verse: Et Poinel solitei
sos sacruficare puellos, "and the Phoenicians [i.e. Carthaginians] were accus-
tomed to sacrifice their own children." After their defeat at the hands of Agath-
ocles, they sacrificed two hundred children to placate their gods. The Greeks fell
in with this impiously pious custom of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians in the
votive sacrifice Agamemnon made of his daughter Iphigema, This should cause
no surprise to anyone who reflects upon the cyclopean paternal power of the first
fathers of the gentile world; a power exercised by the most learned nation, the
Greeks, and by the wisest, the Romans. In both these nations down to the times
of their most cultivated humanity, fathers had the right to kill their newborn
children. This consideration will certainly lessen the repugnance our modern
mildness makes us feel for the action of Brutus in decapitating his two sons who
had plotted to restore the tyrant Tarquinius to the rule of Rome; and for that
of Manlius, called the Imperious, in cutting off the head of his brave son who had
fought and won a battle against his father's orders. Caesar reports that the Gauls
also offered sacrifices of human victims, and Tacitus in the Annals relates of the
Britons that the divine science of the Druids (who, according to the conceit of
the scholars, were rich in esoteric wisdom) divined the future from the entrails
of human victims. This cruel and frightful religion was prohibited by Augustus
to Romans living in Gaul, and it was forbidden to the Gauls themselves by
Claudius, according to Suetonius in his life of that emperor. Students of ori-
ental languages thus hold that the Phoenicians had spread through the rest of
the world the sacrifices of Moloch (identified with Saturn by Mornay, van der
Driesche and Selden), to whom they offered a man burnt alive. Such was the
humanity which the Phoenicians, who brought letters to Greece, went about
inculcating in the first nations of the most barbarous gentiles! It is said that
Hercules had purged Latium of a like fearful custom, that of throwing living
men into the Tiber as sacrifices, and that he had introduced instead the practice
of throwing in men of straw. But Tacitus tells of solemn human sacrifices
among the ancient Germans, who certainly throughout all remembered time
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 159
were cut off from all foreign nations, so that the Romans with all the strength
in the world could not penetrate among them. The Spaniards too found such
rites in America, which until two centuries ago was hidden from all the rest of
the world. The barbarians there feasted on human flesh (according to Lcscarbot,
Histoire de la nouvelle France), which must have been that of men who had been
consecrated and killed by them. (Such sacrifices are described by Oviedo,
Hystoria . . . de las Indias.) So that, while the ancient Germans were behold-
ing the gods on earth, and the American Indians likewise (as we have noted of
both above), and while the most ancient Scythians were rich in so many golden
virtues as we have heard them praised for by the writers in these same times
they were practicing such inhuman humanity! All these [human sacrifices] were
those called in Plautus Saturni hostiae, Saturn's victims, at a time that writers
call the golden age of Latium. Such a mild, benign, sober, decent and well-
behaved time it was!
518 We may conclude from all this how empty has been the conceit of
the learned concerning the innocence of the golden age observed in the first
gentile nations. In fact it was a fanaticism of superstition which kept the first
men of the gentiles, savage, proud and most cruel as they were, in some sort
of restraint by main terror of a divinity they had imagined. Reflecting on this
superstition, Plutarch poses the problem whether it was a lesser evil thus im-
piously to venerate the gods than not to believe in them at all. But he is not just
in weighing this cruel superstition against atheism, for from the former arose
the most enlightened nations while no nation in the world was ever founded on
atheism, as we have shown above in the Principles [334].
519 So much may be said of the divine morality of the first peoples of
the lost human race. The heroic morality we shall discuss in its place.
[SECTION IV]
[POETIC ECONOMY]
[CHAPTER I]
OF POETIC ECONOMY, AND HERE OF THE FAMILIES WHICH AT
FIRST INCLUDED ONLY CHILDREN [AND NOT Famuli]
520 The heroes apprehended with human senses those two truths which
make up the whole of economic doctrine, and which were preserved in the two -
Latin verbs educere and educare. In the prevailing best usage the first of these
applies to the education of the spirit and the second to that of the body. The
first, by a learned metaphor, was transferred by the natural philosophers to the
bringing forth of forms from matter. For heroic education began to bring forth
in a certain way the form of the human soul which had been completely sub-
merged in the vast bodies of the giants, and began likewise to bring forth the
form of the human body itself in its just dimensions from the disproportionate
giant bodies.
521 As regards the first part, the heroic fathers, as we noted in the
Axioms [250], must have been, in the state called that of nature, the wise men
in the wisdom of the auspices or vulgar wisdom, and consequently they must
have been the priests who, as being more worthy, had the duty of making
sacrifices in order to take or understand well the auspices. And finally they must
also have been the kings who had the duty of carrying the laws from the gods
to their own families; that is, they were legislators in the proper sense of the
word, "bearers of laws," as were later the first kings in the heroic cities. For these
carried the laws from the reigning senates to the people, as we have observed
above in the Notes on the Chronological Table [67], in the two kinds of heroic
assemblies described by Homer, the Boule and the Agora. In the former the
heroes decreed the laws orally and in the latter they published them also orally,
for letters had not yet been invented. The kings bore the laws from the reigning
senates in the persons of the duumvirs whom they had appointed to announce
the laws, as Tullijs Hostilius did in the case against Horatius. The duumvirs
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 161
thus came to be living and speaking laws. It is this which Livy does not under-
stand, and hence he does not make himself clear in his account of the sentence
of Horatius, as we observed above.
522 This vulgar tradition together with the false belief in the matchless
wisdom of the ancients tempted Plato to a vain longing for those times in which
philosophers reigned or kings were philosophers. And certainly the fathers, as
noted in the Axioms [256], must have been monarchic family kings, superior to
all other members of their families and subject only to God. Their authority
was fortified by frightful religions and sanctioned by dreadful punishments, as
must have been that of the Cyclopes, in whom Plato recognizes the first family-
fathers of the world. This tradition, misunderstood, gave rise to that common
error of all political theorists, that the first form of civil government in the
world was monarchic. They are thus given over to those false principles of evil
politics: that civil governments were born either of open violence or of fraud
which later broke out into violence. But [the truth is that] in those times, full
of arrogance and savagery because of the fresh emergence from bestial liberty
(on which we have set forth an axiom [290] above), in the extreme simplicity
and crudeness of a life content with the spontaneous fruits of nature, satisfied to
drink the water of the springs and to sleep in the caves, in the natural equality
of a state in which each of the fathers was sovereign in his own family, one
cannot conceive of either fraud or violence by which one man could subject all
the others to a civil monarchy. Further proof of this will be set forth later on.
523 Here, however, we may be permitted to reflect how much it took
for the men of the gentile world to be tamed from their feral native liberty
through a long period of cyclopean family discipline to the point of obeying nat-
urally the laws in the civil states which were to come later. Hence there re-
mained the eternal property that happier than the commonwealth conceived by
Plato are those where the fathers teach only religion and where they are ad-
mired by their sons as their sages, revered as their priests, and feared as their
kings. Such and so much divine force was needed to reduce these giants, as
savage as they were crude, to human duties. Since they were unable to express
this force abstractly, they represented it in concrete physical form as a cord,
called chorda in Greek and in Latin at first fides, whose original and proper
meaning appears in the phrase fides deorum, "force of the gods." From this
cord (for the lyre must have begun with the monochord) they fashioned the
lyre of Orpheus, to the accompaniment of which, singing to them the force of
the gods in the auspices, he reduced the beasts of Greece to humanity. And
Amphion raised the walls of Thebes with stones that moved themselves. These
were the stones which Deucalion and Pyrrha, standing before the temple of
Themis (that is, in the fear of divine justice) with veiled heads (the modesty
of marriage) found lying before their feet (for men were at first stupid and
lapis, "stone," remained Latin for a stupid person) and threw over their shoul-
ders (introducing family orders by means of household discipline), thus making
1 62 THE NEW SCIENCE
men of them, as this fable was explained in the [Notes to the] Chronological
Table [791.
524 As for the other part of household discipline, the education of bodies,
the fathers with their frightful religions, their cyclopean authority and their
sacred ablutions began to educe or bring forth from the giant bodies of their
sons the proper human form, in accordance with what we have said above. And
herein is providence above all to be admired, for it ordained that until such
time as domestic education should supervene, the lost men should become giants
in order that in their feral wanderings they might better endure with their ro-
bust constitutions the inclemency of the heavens and the seasons, and that they
might with their disproportionate strength penetrate the great forest of the earth
(which must have been very dense as a result of the recent flood), so that, fleeing
from wild beasts and pursuing reluctant women and thus becoming lost from
each other, they might be scattered through it in search of food and water until
it should be found in due time fully populated; while after they began to re-
main in one place with their women, first in caves, then in huts near perennial
springs (as we shall presently relate), and in the fields which, brought under
cultivation, gave them sustenance, providence ordained that, from the causes we
are now setting forth, they should shrink to the present proper stature of man-
kind.
525 In the very birth of [domestic] economy, they fulfilled it in its best
idea, which is that the fathers by labor and industry should leave a patrimony
to their sons, so that they may have an easy and comfortable and secure sub-
sistence, even if foreign commerce should fail, or even all the fruits of civil life,
or even the cities themselves, so that in such last emergencies the families at least
may be preserved, from which there is hope that the nations may rise again. And
the patrimony they leave should include places with good air, with their own
perennial water supply, in situations of natural strength whither withdrawal
is possible in case the cities have to be abandoned, and in fields with wide bot-
tom lands on which to maintain the poor peasants taking refuge with them
on the downfall of the cities, by whose labor they can maintain themselves as
lords. Such were the orders that providence established for the state of the
families, not like a tyrant laying down laws but like the queen it is of human
affairs working through customs, according to the saying of Dion which we
cited in the Axioms [308]. For the strong men were found with their lands
on the mountain heights, in air stirred by the wind and hence healthful, and in
sites naturally strong, which were the first arces in the world, later fortified by
the devices of military architecture (as in Italian steep rugged mountains were
called rocce, whence later the term rocche for fortresses), and finally they were
found near perennial springs, which for the most part rise in the mountains.
Near such springs the birds of prey make their nests, and consequently in their
vicinity hunters set their snares. Perhaps for this reason all birds of prey were
called aquilac by the Latins, as if for aquilegae, for certainly aquilcx retained the
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 163
sense of finder or conductor of water. For doubtless those birds whose auspices
Romulus observed to fix the site of the new city were vultures as history tells
us, but later became eagles and the protecting deities of all the Roman armies.
Thus simple and uncouth men, following the eagles which they believed to be
birds of Jove because they flew high in the heavens, discovered the perennial
springs and hence venerated this other great benefit which Heaven had be-
stowed upon them when it reigned on earth. And after the auspices of the
lightning, the most august were those of the eagle's flight. These were called by
Messala and Corvinus major or public auspices, and it was to them that the
Roman patricians referred when in the heroic contests they answered the plebs
that the auspices were theirs (auspicia cssc sua). All this, ordained by providence
to give a beginning to gentile humanity, was regarded by Plato as the result of
wise human measures on the part of the first founders of the cities. But in the
returned barbarism which destroyed cities everywhere, it was in just this way
that the families were preserved whence sprang the new nations of Europe. And
all the new seigniories which then arose were called ca Stella by the Italians, for
we may observe generally that the most ancient cities and almost all the capitals
of peoples were placed on the crests of mountains, while the villages on the other
hand lie scattered on the plains. Such must be the origin of the Latin phrases
summo loco, illustn loco nati to signify "nobles," and tmo loco, obscuro loco nati
for "plebeians"; for, as we shall see later, the heroes dwelt in the cities, the
famuli in the plains.
526 However, above all else, it was with reference to these perennial
springs that political theorists asserted that the sharing of water was the occasion
for families being brought together in their vicinity. Hence the first communities
were called phratriat by the Greeks as the first lands were called pagl by the
Latins from the Dorian Greek for "spring, 55 paga; that is, water, the first of the
two principal solemnities of marriage. For the Romans celebrated marriage
aqua et igm because the first marriages were naturally contracted between men
and women sharing the same water and fire, that is, of the same family; whence,
as we have said above, marriage must have begun between brothers and sisters.
And the lar of each house was the god of the fire aforesaid; hence focus lans
for the hearth where the family father sacrificed to the household gods. In the
Law of the Twelve Tables, in the article on parricide, according to the reading
of Jacobus Raevardus, these gods are called dcivci parentum. A similar expres-
sion is frequently found in Holy Scripture: Deus parentum nostrorum, the God
of our fathers, or, more explicitly, De us Abraham, Deus Isac, Deus lacob, the
God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. On this matter there is also the law proposed
by Cicero, Sacra jamiliana perpetua manento, "let sacred family rites be per-
petually maintained"; whence the phrase of such frequent occurrence in Roman
laws by which a son of a family is said to be in sacns patcrnis, and the paternal
power itself is called sacra patria, for in the first times, as this work demonstrates,
all its judgments were believed to be sacred. It must be added that a like custom
164 THE NEW SCIENCE
was observed by the barbarians who came in after; for in Florence in Giovanni
Boccaccio's time (as he attests in his Genealogies of the Gods) it was the custom
for the father of a family at the beginning of each year to sit at the hearth and
throw incense and sprinkle wine on the end of a log to which he had set fire.
And among the lower classes of our own Naples the Christmas Eve custom is
observed which calls for the father of the house solemnly to set fire to such a
log in the hearth. Indeed in the Kingdom of Naples families are counted by
hearthfires. When cities were later founded the custom became universal of
contracting marriages between those of the same city; and there finally remained
the rule that when marriages are contracted between those of different cities
or countries they should at least have religion in common.
527 To return now from fire to water, the Styx, by which the gods swore,
was the source of the springs; hence the gods must have been the nobles of the
heroic cities (as noted above), for the sharing of the water had given them
dominion over men. Hence down to the 309th year of Rome the patricians ex-
cluded the plebs from connubium, as we have said above and as we shall set forth
at greater length farther on. For all these reasons we often read in Holy Writ
of the "well of the oath" or the "oath of the well." Thus the city of Pozzuoli pre-
serves in its name an indication of its great antiquity, for it was called Puteoli on
account of the number of small wells it contained. And it is a reasonable conjec-
ture, based on the Mental Dictionary of which we have spoken, that the many
cities with plural names scattered through the ancient nations received their
names from the things signified by the singulars of the same names in the several
articulate languages.
528 From this source imagination conceived the third major deity, Diana,
representing the first human need which made itself felt among the giants
when they had settled on definite lands and united in marriage with particular
women. The theological poets have described the history of these things in two
fables of Diana. The first, signifying the modesty of marriage, tells of Diana
silently lying with the sleeping Endymion under the darkness of night; so that
Diana is chaste with that chastity referred to in a law proposed by Cicero, Deos
caste adeunto, that one should go to the sacrifice only after making the sacred
ablutions. The other tells us of the fearful religion of the water-springs, to
which was attached the perpetual epithet of sacred. It is the tale of Actaeon, who,
seeing Diana naked (the living spring) and being sprinkled with water by the
goddess (to signify that the goddess cast over him the great awe of her divinity),
was changed into a stag (the most timid of animals) and torn to pieces by his
dogs (the remorse of his own conscience for the violation of religion). Hence
lymphati (properly, sprinkled with lympha or pure water) must have been
originally a term applied to the Actaeons who had been maddened by super-
stitious terror. This poetic history was preserved by the Latins in their word
latices (evidently from latendo), to which is always added the epithet part,
and which means the water gushing from a spring. The latices of the Latins
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 165
must have been identical with the Greek nymphs, handmaidens of Diana, for
nymphai in Greek meant the same as lymphae [in Latin], The nymphs were
so named at a time when all things were apprehended as animate and for the
most part human substances, as we have set forth above in the [ Poetic J Meta-
physics.
529 Afterwards, the god-fearing giants, those settled in the mountains,
must have become sensible of the stench from the corpses of their dead rotting
on the ground near by, and must have begun to bury them; for enormous skulls
and bones have been found and are still found, generally on mountain tops,
which is a strong indication that the bodies of the impious giants who were
scattered everywhere through the valleys and the plains must have rotted un-
buried and their skulls and bones must have been swept into the sea by the
rivers or completely worn away by the rains. And they surrounded these
sepulchers with so much religion, or divine terror, that burial grounds were
called by the Latins religious places par excellence. Hence emerged the uni-
versal belief in the immortality of human souls, which we established above in
the Principles as the third of those on which our Science is based. [The souls
of the departed] were called dii manes, and in the Law of the Twelve Tables in
the article on parricide they are spoken of as deivei parentum. Furthermore,
they must have fixed a stake as a burial marker upon or near the mound, which
originally can have been nothing but a slight rounding over of the earth. (The
ancient Germans, according to Tacitus, believed that they should not cover the
dead with overmuch earth, whence the prayer for the dead, Sit tibi terra levis,
"May the earth lie light upon thee!" And this German practice permits us to
conjecture that the same custom must have prevailed among all the other first
barbarous nations.) The grave marker was called by the Greeks the phylax or
guardian, because these simple people believed that the post would guard the
grave. Cippus, the Latin name for the post, came to mean sepulcher, and ceppo
in Italian means the trunk of a genealogical tree. Phylax must accordingly have
been the origin of the Greek phyle, a tribe. And the Romans set forth their
genealogies by placing the statues of their ancestors in rows along the halls of
their houses, and these rows were called stemmata. (This term must have been
derived from temen, "thread"; whence subtemen for the thread that is carried
under as weft in weaving cloth.) The jurisconsults later called these genealogical
rows lineac or "lines," and down to our time stemmata has kept the meaning
of family arms. Thus it is highly probable that the first lands with such
buried bodies were the first shields of the families, and the phrase of the Spartan
mother, presenting the shield to her son as he goes to war, aut cum hoc, aut in
hoc, must be understood as meaning, "return with this or on a bier." Even to
this day in Naples the bier is called a shield (scudo). And since the sepulchers
were at the lower end of the fields, which were at first fields for plartting, the
shield is defined in the science of heraldry as the base of the field, later called
the base of the arms.
1 66 THE NEW SCIENCE
530 From the same origin must have come the word filius, which,
qualified by the name or house of the father, signified noble, precisely as we
saw above that the Roman patrician was defined as one qui potest nomine ciere
patrem, "who can name his father." And we saw above that the names of the
Romans were really patronymics, which were so often used by the first Greeks;
Homer, for example, calling the heroes fihi Achivorum, "sons of the Achaeans";
and in like fashion in Holy Scripture fihi Israel is used of the nobles of the
Hebrew people. Hence necessarily, if the tribes were originally composed of
nobles, the cities must at first have been made up of nobles alone, as we shall
show later.
531 Thus by the graves of their buried dead the giants showed their
dominion over their lands, and Roman law called for burial of the dead in a
proper place to make it religious. With truth they could pronounce those heroic
phrases: we are sons of this earth, we are born from these oaks. Indeed the heads
of families among the Latins called themselves stirpcs and stipites, "stems" or
"stocks," and their progeny were called propagines, "slips" or "shoots." In
Italian such families were called legnaggi, "lineages." And the most noble houses
of Europe and almost all its reigning families take their names from the lands
over which they rule. Thus in Latin and Greek alike son of the earth means
the same thing as noble; and in Latin ingenui, "the indigenous ones," as if for
indegeniti or the shorter form ingeniti, meant the nobles; as certainly mdigcnae
retained the meaning of natives of a country. Dn indigetcs was the term used for
the native gods, who must have been the nobles of the heroic cities, for they were
called gods, as we have said above, and the Earth was their great mother. Hence
from the beginning ingenuus and patricius meant noble, for the first cities were
of nobles only; and these ingenui must have been the aborigines, styled as it
were "without origin" or self-born, to which correspond exactly the Greek
autochthones. And the aborigines were giants, and the term giants properly
signifies sons of Earth. Thus, as the fables faithfully tell us, Earth was the mother
of gods and giants.
532 These matters have already been set forth above, but here in their
proper place we have repeated them to show that Livy [1.8] misattributed the
heroic phrase to Romulus and the fathers who were his companions when he
made them say to those who had taken refuge in the asylum opened in the clear-
ing that they were sons of that land; and he makes that become in their mouths
a barefaced lie which in [the case of] the founders of the first peoples had been
a heroic truth. For on the one hand Romulus was recognized as of the royal
family of Alba, and on the other hand their mother [earth] had been so unjust
to them as to give birth only to men, so that they had to carry off the Sabine
maidens to be their wives. We must therefore say that, in the manner the first
peoples had of thinking in terms of poetic characters, Romulus, regarded as the
founder of a city, was invested with the properties of the founders of the first
cities of LatiunV in the midst of a great number of which Romulus founded
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 167
Rome. Linked with the aforesaid error of Livy is the definition he gives of the
asylum, that it was vetus urbes condentium consilium, "an old counsel of
founders of cities"; for in the first founders of cities, who were simple men, it
was not counsel but nature that was employed by providence.
533 Imagination here created the fourth divinity of the so-called gentes
maiores; namely, Apollo, apprehended as god of civil light. Thus the heroes
were called %leitoi, "resplendent," by the Greeks, from t(leos, "glory," and they
were called inclyti by the Latins from cluer, "the splendor of arms," and con-
sequently from that light into which Juno Lucina brought noble offspring. So
here, after Urania whom we noted above to be the Muse defined by Homer
as the science of good and evil, or of divination, in virtue of which Apollo is
the god of poetic wisdom or divination they must have conceived the second
of the Muses, Clio, the narrator of heroic history. The first history of this sort
must have begun with the genealogies of the heroes, just as sacred history be-
gins with the descendants of the patriarchs. Apollo begins this history by pur-
suing Daphne, a vagabond maiden wandering through the forests (in the
nefarious life); and she, by the aid she besought of the gods (whose auspices
were necessary for solemn nuptials), on standing still is changed to a laurel (a
plant which is ever green in its certainly known offspring), in the same sense
in which the Latins use stipttcs for the stocks of families; and the returned bar-
barism brought back the same heroic phraseology, for they call genealogies
trees, and the founders they call stocks or stems, and the descendants branches,
and the families lineages. Hence the pursuit of Apollo was the act of a god, and
the flight of Daphne that of an animal; but later, when the language of this
austere history had been forgotten, it came about that the pursuit of Apollo
was viewed as the act of a libertine, and the flight of Daphne as the reaction of
a woman.
534 Further, Apollo is the Brother of Diana, for the perennial springs
made possible the founding of the first nations on the mountain tops; where-
fore Apollo has his seat on Mount Parnassus where dwell the Muses (the arts of
humanity), near the fount of Hippocrene, whose waters give drink to the swans,
birds that sing in that sense in which the Latin verbs cancre and cantare mean
"to predict." Under the auspices of one of these swans, as we have said above,
Leda conceives two eggs and from one of them gives birth to Helen and from
the other to the twins Castor and Pollux.
535 And Apollo and Diana are children of Latona, so called from latere,
"to hide" (the sense which condere originally had in the phrases condere gentes,
condere regna, condere urbes) 9 whence in Italy the name of Latium. And Latona
brought forth her children near the waters of the perennial springs we have men-
tioned; and at their birth men became frogs, which in summer rains are born
from the earth, called mother of giants, for these are properly sons of Earth. One
of these frogs was sent by Idanthyrsus to Darius, and it must be three frogs and
not three toads that appear in the royal arms of France, later changed to golden
168 THE NEW SCIENCE
lilies. And since the number three was used for the superlative a usage which
persisted in the French tres the three frogs mean one great frog, which is to
say a great son, and therefore lord, of the earth.
536 Apollo and Diana are both hunters, slaying beasts with uprooted
trees, one of which is the club of Hercules. They do this first in defense of them-
selves and their families (since they are no longer permitted to save themselves
by flight as the vagabonds of the lawless life had done), and later to provide
food. Thus Vergil makes the heroes feast on such game; and with like purpose,
according to Tacitus, the ancient Germans and their wives hunted down the
beasts.
537 Apollo is also the founding god of humanity and of its arts, which
we have just seen to be the Muses. These arts the Latins call liberates in the
sense of noble. One of them is the art of riding, whence Pegasus soars over
Mount Parnassus armed with wings because he pertains to the nobility. And
in the returned barbarism the nobles were called cavaliers by the Spaniards be-
cause only they could don armor [for fighting] on horseback. This humanity
had its origin in humare, "to bury" (which is the reason we took the practice
of burial as the third principle of our Science), and the Athenians, who were
the most human of all the nations, were, according to Cicero, the first to bury
their dead.
538 Lastly, Apollo is always young (just as the life of Daphne, changed
to a laurel, is always verdant), for Apollo, through the names of the great
houses, makes men eternal in their families. And he wears his hair long as a
sign of nobility. The custom of wearing the hair long was preserved by the
nobility of many nations, and we read that one of the punishments of nobles
among both the Persians and the American Indians was to pull one or several
hairs from their heads. And perhaps Galha comata, Long-haired [Transalpine]
Gaul, was so called from the nobles who founded that nation; as certainly the
slaves in all nations have their heads shaved.
539 Now, however, when the heroes had settled within circumscribed
lands and when with the increase of their families the spontaneous fruits of
nature were no longer sufficient, while yet they feared to seek for abundance
beyond the confines they had set for themselves by those chains of religion by
which the giants were chained under the mountains, and having been taught by
that same religion to set fire to the forests in order to have a prospect of the open
sky whence came the auspices, they then set about the long, arduous, and heavy
task of bringing their lands under cultivation and sowing them with grain,
which, roasted among the thorns and briers, they had perhaps discovered to be
useful for human nourishment. Hereupon, by a fine natural and necessary meta-
phor, they called the ears of grain golden apples, transferring the idea of the
apples which are fruits of nature gathered in summer, to the ears of grain which
human industry gathers likewise in summer.
540 From this labor, the greatest and most glorious of all, the [ poetic]
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 169
character of Hercules sprang up, reflecting great glory on Juno who set this task
for the nourishment of the families. And, in other metaphors both beautiful
and necessary, they imagined the earth in the aspect of a great dragon, covered
with scales and spines (the thorns and briers), bearing wings (for the lands
belonged to the heroes), always awake and vigilant (thickly grown in every
direction). This dragon they made the guardian of the golden apples in the
garden of the Hesperides. Because of the wetness from the waters of the flood,
the dragon was later believed to have been born in the water. Under another
aspect they imagined fthe earth as] a hydra (also from hyddr, "water"), which,
when any of its heads were cut off, always grew others in their place. It was of
three alternating colors: black (the burnt-over land), green (the leaf), and gold
(the ripe grain). These are the three colors of the serpent's skin, which, when
it grows old, is sloughed off for a fresh one. Finally, under the aspect of its fierce-
ness in resisting cultivation, the earth was also imagined as a most powerful
beast, the Nemean lion (whence later the name lion was given to the most
powerful of the animals); which philologists hold to have been a monstrous ser-
pent. All these beasts vomit forth fire, which is the fire set to the forests by
Hercules.
541 These three different stories, from three different parts of Greece,
signify the same thing in substance. In another part of Greece another story
grew up, telling of the child Hercules slaying the serpents while yet in his
cradle; that is, in the infancy of the heroic age. In yet another, Bellerophon
slays the monster called the Chimaera, having the tail of a serpent, the body of
a goat (to signify the enforested earth), and the head of a lion belching flames.
In Thebes it is Cadmus who slays the great dragon and sows his teeth. (By a
fine metaphor they gave the name of serpents teeth to the curved pieces of hard
wood which must have been used to plough the earth before the use of iron was
discovered.) Cadmus himself becomes a serpent (the ancient Romans would
have said Cadmus fundus jactus est), as we have indicated above and as we shall
explain more fully later on, when we shall see that the serpents of Medusa's head
and Mercury's staff signified the dominion of the lands. Hence land rent was
called ofhcleia from ophis> "serpent," and was also called the tithe of Hercules.
It is in this sense that we read in Homer of the soothsayer Calchas interpreting
the action of the serpent in devouring the eight swallows and their mother as
meaning that the land of Troy would fall under the dominion of the Greeks at
the end of nine years; so that the Greeks, while fighting the Trojans, when a
serpent is slain by an eagle in the air and falls among them in the midst of the
battle, take it for a good augury in conformity with the soothsaying science of
Calchas. Hence Proserpine, who was the same as Ceres, is depicted in sculpture
as being borne off in a chariot drawn by serpents, and hence serpents so often
appear on the coins of the Greek commonwealths.
542 Thus, in illustration of the Mental Dictionary (and it is a matter
worthy of reflection), the kings of the American Indians, as Fracastoro sings in
170 THE NEW SCIENCE
his Syphilis, were found to carry a dried snakeskin in place of a scepter. The
Chinese too charge their royal arms with a dragon and bear a dragon as the
emblem of the civil power. Such must have been the Dragon [Draco] who wrote
the Athenian laws in blood; and we remarked above that this Dragon was one
of the serpents of the Gorgon, nailed by Perseus to his shield, which later be-
came the shield of Minerva, goddess of the Athenians, and its aspect turned to
stone whoever gazed upon it; and this will be found to have been a hieroglyph
of the civil power of Athens. Holy Scripture too, in the book of Ezekiel, bestows
on the king of Egypt the title of the great dragon lying in the midst of his rivers,
just as the dragons noted above were born in the water and the Hydra took
its name from that element. The emperor of Japan has created an order of knights
who bear the dragon as their device. And in the returned barbarian times the
histories tell us that the house of the Visconti because of its great nobility was
called to the duchy of Milan, and this house bears on its arms a dragon de-
vouring a child, which is none other than the Python which devoured the men
of Greece and was slain by Apollo, the god of nobility as we have seen. This
blazoning may well cause astonishment at the uniformity between the heroic
mode of thought of the men of this second barbarism and that of the ancients
of the first. Such must be the two winged dragons wearing the necklace of
flints by which the fire they vomit forth was kindled; the two guardians, that
is, of the Golden Fleece, whose significance Chiflet, who wrote the history of
that illustrious order, could not understand, so that Pietrasanta avows its his-
tory obscure.
543 As in some parts of Greece it was Hercules who killed the serpents,
the lion, the Hydra, or the dragon, and in another it was Bellerophon who slew
the Chimaera, so in yet another it is Bacchus who tames the tigers, which must
have been the lands clothed in colors as varied as their skin, and hence the name
tiger passed to the animals of this powerful species. The story of Bacchus
taming the tigers with wine is a physical history far from the thought of the
rustic heroes who founded the nations, nor was it ever related in those times
that Bacchus went to Africa or to Hyrcania to tame them, for the Greeks, as we
shall show in our Poetic Geography, could not then have known if there was a
Hyrcania in the world, much less an Africa, to say nothing of tigers in the
forests of Hyrcania or the deserts of Africa.
544 Further, when they called the ears of grain golden apples, these must
have been the only gold in the world. For at that time metallic gold was still
unmined, and they did not know how to extract it in crude masses, to say
nothing of shining and burnishing it; nor indeed, when men still drank the
water of springs, could the use of gold have been at all prized. It was only later,
from the metal's resemblance in color to the most highly prized food of those
times, that it was metaphorically called gold. Hence Plautus was obliged to say
thcsaurum auri to distinguish a hoard of gold from a granary. Certainly Job,
among the great things from which he had fallen, mentions that he had been
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 171
wont to eat bread made of grain. And in the country districts of our most re-
mote provinces, in place of the juleps of powdered pearls used in cities, they
give bread made from grain to the sick, and they say the sick man is eating
grain bread when they mean that he is at the point of death.
545 Later, by a further extension of the idea of prizing and cherishing,
they must have applied the term golden to fine wool. Hence in Homer Atreus
complains that Thyestes has stolen his golden sheep, and the Argonauts stole
from Pontus the Golden Fleece. For this reason Homer gives his kings and
heroes the fixed epithet polymelos, "rich in flocks"; as the ancient Latins, by
uniformity of ideas, called the patrimony pecunia, which the Latin grammarians
derive from pecus, "herd" or "flock." Among the ancient Germans, in Tacitus's
account, the flocks and herds are their most highly prized, indeed their only
wealth (solae ct gratissimae opes sunt). This custom must also have prevailed
among the ancient Romans, whose patrimony was pecunia, as the Law of the
Twelve Tables attests in the article on testaments. And melon means both apple
and sheep to the Greeks, who, perhaps also under the aspect of precious fruit,
called honey meli; and the Italians call apples mele.
546 These ears of grain must then have been the golden apples which
Hercules was the first to bring back (or harvest) from Hesperia. The Gallic
Hercules, with chains of this gold issuing from his mouth, binds men by the
ears; this too we shall find later is a history of the cultivation of the fields. Hence
Hercules was a propitious deity in the search for treasures, of which Dis was the
god. Dis is the same as Pluto, who carries Proserpine, who is the same as Ceres
(that is, grain), into the underworld of which the poets tell us. According to
them there were three underworlds: the first by the Styx, the second where the
dead lay, and the third at the bottom of the furrow, as we shall show in its proper
place. From this god Dis the rich are called ditcs, and the rich were the nobles.
The Spaniards call their nobles rich men (ricos hombres) and among us the
nobles were formerly called benestanti, ''well off." The ancient Latins called dido
what we now call the domain of a state, for the cultivated fields make up the
true wealth of states; and in like fashion the Latins called the area of a domain
ager, which is properly land which has been put to the plough (aratro agitur).
So it must be true that the Nile was called Chrysorrhoas, "flowing with gold," be-
cause it overflows the wide fields of Egypt and its inundations are the source of
the great abundance of the harvests. So too the Pactolus, the Ganges, the
Hydaspes and the Tagus are called rivers of gold because they make fertile the
fields of grain. Vergil must have had these golden apples in mind when, learned
in heroic antiquities as he was, he extended the metaphor and created the golden
bough that Aeneas carries into the lower world. This fable we shall explain
later in its more proper place. For the rest, metallic gold was not more highly
prized than iron in heroic times. Etearchus, for example, king of Ethiopia, reply-
ing to the ambassadors of Cambyses who had presented him with many golden
vessels in the name of their king, said that he could see no use for them and
172 THE NEW SCIENCE
much less any need, thus refusing them with a magnanimity that was quite
natural. Tacitus relates the same of the ancient Germans, who in his time were
just such ancient heroes as those of whom we are now speaking: "You may see
among them vessels of silver, which have been presented to their envoys and
chieftains, held as cheap as those of clay." So in Homer we find the armories of
the heroes stocked with arms of iron or gold indifferently, for the first world
must have abounded in these minerals (as America was found to do at its dis-
covery), which were later to be exhausted by human avarice.
547 From all of which we derive this great corollary: that the division
of the four ages of the world that is, the ages of gold, silver, copper and iron
was invented by the poets of degenerate times. For it was this poetic gold,
namely, grain, that among the Greeks lent its name to the golden age, whose in-
nocence was but the extreme savagery of the Cyclopes (in whom, as we have
said several times above, Plato recognizes the first fathers of families), who
lived separately and alone in their caves with their wives and children, never
concerning themselves with one another's affairs, as Polyphemus tells Ulysses in
Homer.
548 In confirmation of all we have so far said of the poetic gold, it may
be useful to cite two customs which are still observed and the causes of which
can be explained only on these principles. The first is the custom of putting a
golden globe [porno, "apple"] in the hands of the king in the midst of the
solemnities of his coronation. This is evidently the same [pome or globe] that
they bear in their royal arms, surmounting their crowns. This custom can have
no other origin than the golden apples of grain we are here discussing. For here
too the apples will be found to be a hieroglyph of the dominion of the heroes
over their lands (which perhaps the Egyptians too signified by an apple, if it
is not an egg, in the mouth of their [god Knuphis or] Knef, of whom we shall
speak later on). And this hieroglyph, we shall find, was carried by the barbarians
who invaded all the nations subject to the Roman Empire. The other custom is
that of the gold coins which kings give their queen consorts among the other
solemnities of their nuptials. These too must go back to the poetic gold or grain
of which we are speaking (for the gold coins signify the heroic nuptials of the
ancient Romans coemptions et farre f "by mutual mock sale and bread offering"),
in conformity with the heroic practice related by Homer of buying their wives
with a wedding gift. It was in a shower of this gold that Jove must have appeared
to Danae locked in her tower (which must have been the granary), to signify
the abundance of this solemnity. In striking agreement is the Hebrew phrase
"and abundance in thy towers" (et abundantia in turribus tuis [Ps. 122:7]). The
conjecture is confirmed by the custom of the ancient Britons, among whom
grooms, as a part of the wedding ceremony, gave their brides cakes.
549 At the birth of these human things, three other deities of the gentes
maiores sprang forth in the imaginations of the Greeks, with this order of
ideas, corresponding to the order of the things themselves. First Vulcan, then
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM !73
Saturn (so called from sati, "sown fields," whence the age of Saturn among the
Latins corresponds to the golden age of the Greeks), and thirdly Cybele or
Berecynthia, the cultivated land. Cybele is depicted as seated on a lion (the
enf crested earth which the heroes reduced to tillage, as explained above), and
is called the great mother of the gods and also the mother of the giants (who
were properly so called in the sense of sons of Earth, as noted above). Hence she
is the mother of the gods (that is, of the giants, who in the time of the first
cities arrogated to themselves the name of gods, as we have also noted before),
and the pine is sacred to her (as a sign of the stability of the founders of peo-
ples, who, remaining settled on the first lands, founded the cities, of which
Cybele is the goddess). She was called Vesta, goddess of divine ceremonies
among the Romans, for the lands ploughed at that time were the first altars of
the world (as we shall see in the Poetic Geography). Here the goddess Vesta,
armed with a fierce religion, watched over fire and spelt, which was the grain
of the ancient Romans. Hence too among the Romans nuptials were celebrated
aqua et igni, "with water and fire," and also with spelt (far), and were then
called nuptlae conjarreatae. This ceremony was later confined to priests, for the
first families had been all of priests (as has been found to be the case in the king-
doms of the bonzes in the East Indies). And water, fire and spelt were the ele-
ments used in the Roman divine ceremonies. On these first lands Vesta sacrificed
to Jove the impious f practicers] of the infamous sharing [of women and things],
who violated the first altars (which we have said above were the first fields of
grain, as we shall explain later). These were the first hostiae, the first victims of
the gentile religions. Plautus called them Satutni hostiae, "Saturn's victims," as
we have observed above; and they were called victimae from victi, as being
weak because alone (the Latin victus has preserved this meaning of weakness),
and they were called hostes because such impious men were rightly held to be
enemies of the whole human race. And among the Romans it remained the
custom to cover with spelt the brow and the horns of sacrificial victims. From the
name of Vesta the Romans called Vestal virgins those who guarded the eternal
fire, which if extinguished by mishap had to be relighted from the sun, for from
the sun, as we shall see later, Prometheus stole the first fire and brought it to
the Greeks on earth, who therewith set fire to the forests and began to cultivate
the land. On this account Vesta is the goddess of divine ceremonies among the
Romans, for the first colere or cultivating in the world of the gentiles was the
cultivation of the land, and the first cult was raising these altars, setting this first
fire to them, and sacrificing upon them the impious men of whom we have just
spoken.
550 In this way the boundaries of the fields were fixed and maintained.
This division, too generally set forth by Hermogenianus the jurisconsult, has
been imagined as taking place by deliberate agreement of men, and carried out
with justice and respected in good faith, at a time when there was as yet no
armed public force and consequently no civil authority of law. But it cannot be
174 E NEW SCIENCE
understood save as taking place among men of extreme wildness, observing a
frightful religion which had fixed and circumscribed them within certain lands,
and whose bloody ceremonies had consecrated their first walls. For even the
philologists say the walls were traced by the founders of the cities with the
plough, the moldboard of which, by the origins of language above discovered,
must have been first called urbs, whence the ancient urbum, "curved." Perhaps
orbis is from the same origin, so that at first orbis terrac must have meant any
fence made in this way, so low that Remus jumped over it to be killed by
Romulus and thus, as Latin historians narrate, to consecrate with his blood the
first walls of Rome. Such a fence must evidently have been a hedge (siepe) (and
among the Greeks seps signifies "serpent" in its heroic meaning of "cultivated
land"), from which origin must come muncre viam, "to build a road," which
is done by strengthening the hedges around the fields. Hence walls are called
moenia, as if for munia, and certainly munire kept the sense of "fortifying."
The hedges must have been of those plants the Latins called sagmina, blood-
wort or elder, whose use and name still survive. The name sagtnina was pre-
served in the sense of the herbs with which the altars were adorned; it must have
come from the blood (sanguis) of the slain, who, like Remus, had transgressed
them. Hence the so-called sanctity of walls, and also of heralds, who, as we shall
see later, crowned themselves with these herbs, as certainly the ancient Roman
ambassadors did with those plucked on the Capitoline. And hence finally the
sanctity of the laws of war and peace of which the heralds were bearers, whence
that part of a law which imposes penalties on its transgressors is called its sanc-
tion. And here begins what we are demonstrating in this work: that the natural
law of nations was by divine providence ordained separately for each people,
and only when they became acquainted did they recognize it as common to all.
For if the Roman heralds consecrated with these herbs were inviolate among the
other peoples of Latium, it could only have been because the latter, without
knowing anything of Roman usage, observed the same custom.
551 So the family fathers provided a subsistence for their heroic families
through religion, and through religion it had to be maintained. Hence it was the
perpetual custom of the nobles to be religious, as Julius Scaliger observes in his
Poetica. It must then be a strong indication of the decline of a nation when the
nobles scorn their native religion.
552 Philologians and philosophers have commonly supposed that the
families in the so-called state of nature included children only; whereas in fact
they included famuli and that was the original reason for their being called
families. On this defective economy a false politics has been erected, as we have
noted above and shall show fully later on. Wherefore from this matter of the
famuli, which pertains to economic theory, we shall proceed to discourse of
politics.
[CHAPTER II]
THE FAMILIES WITH THEIR Famuli, WHICH PRECEDED
THE CITIES, AND WITHOUT WHICH THE CITIES COULD NOT
HAVE BEEN BORN
553 Among the impious giants who had continued the infamous sharing
of property and women, the quarrels produced by the sharing finally brought
it about, at the end of a long period of time, that (to borrow the language of the
jurists) Grotius's simpletons and Pufendorfs abandoned men had recourse to
the altars of the strong to save themselves from Hobbes's violent men, even as
beasts driven by intense cold will sometimes seek salvation in inhabited places.
Thereupon the strong, with a fierceness born of their union in the society of
families, slew the violent who had violated their lands, and took under their
protection the miserable creatures who had fled from them. And above the hero-
ism of nature which was theirs as having been born of Jove or engendered under
his auspices, there now shone forth preeminently in them the heroism of virtue.
In this heroism the Romans excelled all other peoples of the earth, practicing pre-
cisely these two aspects ot it, sparing the submissive and vanquishing the proud:
Par cere subtectis et debcllarc super bos.
554 And here it is worth reflecting how men in the feral state, fierce and
untamed as they were, came to pass from their bestial liberty into human society.
For in order that the first of them should reach that first kind of society which
is matrimony, they had need of the sharp stimulus of bestial lust, and to keep
them in it the stern restraints of frightful religions were necessary, as we have
shown above. Thus marriage emerged as the first kind of friendship in the
world; whence Homer, to indicate that Jove and Juno lay together, says with
heroic gravity that "they celebrated their friendship." The Greek word for friend-
ship, philia, is from the same root as phdeo, "to love"; and from it is derived
the Latin filius, "son." Phihos in Ionic Greek means "friend," and mutation to
a letter of similar sound yielded the Greek phyle, "tribe." We have already seen
above that stcmmata was the word for the genealogical threads called lineae
by the jurisconsults. From tnis nature of human things there remained the
eternal property that the true natural friendship is matrimony, in which are
realized the three final goods: the honorable, the useful and the pleasant. Hus-
band and wife by nature share the same lot in all the prosperities and adversities
of life, just as by choice friends have all things in common (amicorum omnia
176 THE NEW SCIENCE
sunt communia)) and Modestinus therefore defines matrimony as a life-long lot-
sharing (omnis vitac consortium).
555 The second comers came into this second society (which had that
name by a certain excellence, as we shall shortly show) only for the ultimate
necessities of life. And here again is a matter worthy of reflection. For the first
comers to human society were driven thereto by religion and the natural instinct
to propagate the human race (the former a pious motive, the latter in the strict
sense a gentle one), and thus gave a beginning to noble and lordly friendship.
The second comers, since they came out of a necessity of saving their lives, gave
a beginning to society in the proper sense, with a view principally to utility, and
consequently base and servile. These refugees were received by the heroes under
the just law of protection, by which they preserved their natural lives under the
obligation of serving the heroes as day laborers. So from the fame (jama) of the
heroes (primarily acquired through the practice of the aforesaid two parts of
the heroism of virtue) and from the worldly renown which is the Jtfeos or
"glory" of the Greeks (called jama by the Latins and pheme too by the Greeks),
the refugees were called famuli , and it was principally from these famuli that
the families took their name. It is certainly from this fame that sacred history,
speaking of the giants before the flood, calls them famous men. Vergil too
similarly describes Fama as seated on a high tower (the high-lying lands of the
heroes) with her head in the sky (whose vault rises from the mountain tops),
having wings (as pertaining to the heroes, whence on the battlefield before
Troy Fame flies amid the ranks of the Greek heroes and not amid the masses of
their plebeians), and with a trumpet (which must be the trumpet of Clio, that
is, heroic history) celebrating the names of the great (the founders of nations).
556 In these families before the time of the cities, the famuli lived in a
state of slavery. (They were the forerunners of the slaves who were captured in
the wars which began after the founding of cities. These latter slaves were
called vernae by the Latins; with them came the languages called vernaculac, as
we have explained above.) To distinguish the sons of the heroes from those of
the famuli, the former were called libcri, "free." But it was a distinction without
a difference. For Tacitus tells us of the ancient Germans (and we may thence
conjecture the same custom among all the first barbarous peoples) that the mas-
ter is not distinguished from the slave by being brought up with greater delicacy
(dominum etc scrvum nullis education!* dclicns dignoscas)\ and certainly among
the ancient Romans the family fathers had a sovereign power of life and death
over their children and a despotic dominion over the property they acquired, so
that down to imperial times there was no difference between sons and slaves in
respect of their property. But originally the word liberi meant also "noble," so
that artes liberates are noble arts, and liberalis kept the meaning "well-born,"
and liberalitas that of "gentility." From the same ancient origin the noble houses
of the Latins were called gcntes, for, as we shall see, the first gcntes were made
up of nobles alone, and only nobles were free in the first cities. Furthermore, the
BOOK n. POETIC WISDOM 177
famuli were called clientes, originally cluentes from the ancient verb cluere, "to
shine in the light of arms" (whose splendor was called cluer), for they reflected
the light of the arms borne by their respective heroes. The latter were called
first incluti and later inclyti from the same root. If not thus resplendent they
were not noticed, as if they had no place among men, as will be explained later.
557 Thus began the clienteles and the first intimations of the fiefs of
which we shall have much to say later. In ancient history we read of such
clienteles and clients scattered through all nations, as is set forth in the Axioms
[263]. But Thucydides relates that in Egypt, even in his time, the dynasties of
Tanis were all divided among family fathers, the shepherd princes of such
families; and Homer calls each hero of whom he sings a king, and describes
them as shepherds of the peoples, who must have appeared before the shepherds
of the flocks, as we shall show later. They are still found in great numbers in
Arabia, as they once were in Egypt; and in the West Indies the greater part were
found in this state of nature to be governed by such families, surrounded by
slaves in such numbers as to cause Charles V, king of Spain, to consider impos-
ing restrictive measures. It must have been with a family such as these that
Abraham made war against the gentile kings; and his servants, who aided him,
are called by a name much to our purpose which Hebrew scholars translate
vernaculos, according well with the vernae discussed above.
558 With the beginning of these things came the true origin of the
famous Herculean knot by which clients were said to be ncxi or tied to the
lands they had to cultivate for the nobles. Later this became a figurative knot,
as we shall see, in the Law of the Twelve Tables, which gave form to the civil
mancipation by which all the actus legitimt of the Romans were solemnized.
Now at this point, because one cannot conceive an association more restricted
from the side of those having abundance of goods nor more necessary for those
who need them, the first socii in the world must have had their beginning. As
we have noted in the Axioms [258], these were the socit of the heroes, received
for life, as they had placed their lives in the hands of the heroes. This explains
how Ulysses is on the point of cutting off the head of Antinous [i.e Eurylochus],
the chief of his socii, just for a word which, though well meant, does not please
him; and the pious Aeneas kills his soaus Misenus when it is needful for a
sacrifice. This episode was preserved in a vulgar tradition, but Vergil, since in
the mild days of the Roman people it was too harsh a thing to tell of Aeneas,
whom the poet himself celebrates for his piety, discreetly pretends that Misenus
was killed by Triton for presuming to rival him on the trumpet. At the same
time he gives clear hints for the right understanding of the story by placing
the death of Misenus among the solemnities prescribed to Aeneas by the Sybil.
For one of them was that he must bury Misenus before he could make his descent
to the lower world; and this is an open acknowledgment that the Sybil had pre-
dicted his death.
559 Thus the socti shared only the labors of the heroes, not their winnings,
i;8 THE NEW SCIENCE
and still less their glory. With this last only the heroes shone, and they were
therefore called tyeitoi or "illustrious" by the Greeks and inclyti by the Latins.
(There was a similar relationship between the Romans and the provinces they
called associate.) Aesop complains of this state of affairs in his fable of the
lion's partnership, as we have said above [425]. Among the ancient Germans,
certainly, as Tacitus tells us (thereby justifying a like conjecture for all other
barbarous peoples), the principal oath of these famuli or clients or vassals was to
guard and defend each his own prince and to assign to his prince's glory his
own deeds of valor (suum prindpcm defenders ct tucri, sua quoquc jortia jacta
gloriae eius adsignare, praecipuum iuramentum esf) ; which is one of the most
impressive characteristics of our own feudalism. Thus and not otherwise must
it have come about that under the person or head (which, as we shall later see,
meant the same as "mask") and under the name (or as we would now say "de-
vice") of a Roman paterfamilias were counted, in law, all his children and all
his slaves. Hence the Romans called dypea or shields the half-busts represent-
ing the images of their ancestors, set in the hollow niches of their courtyard
walls. And in modern architecture, quite in line with what we have been say-
ing about the origins of medals, these shields are called medallions. And thus
in the heroic times of the Greeks Homer could say with perfect truth that Ajax
was "the tower of the Greeks," as alone he battles with whole battalions of
Trojans; as in the heroic times of the Romans Horatius alone on the bridge
stands off an army of Etruscans; for Ajax and Horatius are alone with their
vassals. Just so in the history of the returned barbarism forty Norman heroes
returning from the Holy Land scatter an army of Saracens besieging Salerno.
Whence it must be said that these first ancient examples of protection extended
by the heroes over those who had taken refuge on their lands marked the begin-
ning of fiefs in the world. The first were personal rustic fiefs, and the vassals must
have been the first vades or "implements," obliged to follow their heroes in
person wherever they led them to till their fields (whence the term vades was
later applied to defendants obliged to appear with their attorneys in court). And
just as the vassal was called vas in Latin and has in Greek, he continued to be
called was and wassus by the barbarian writers on feudal law. Later the real
rustic fiefs must have developed, under which the vassals must have been the
first praedes or mancipes, under real-estate bond; and mancipes remained the
proper term for those under bond to the treasury, of whom we shall have more
to say later.
560 Here likewise must have been the origin of the first heroic colonies
which we call inland to differentiate them from the maritime colonies which
came later. The latter we shall see were simply bands of refugees who took to the
sea and found safety in other lands (as noted in the Axioms [300]). For the
term colony properly signifies merely a crowd of workers who till the soil (as
they still do) for their daily sustenance. The histories of these two kinds of
colonies are contained in two fables, (i) For the inland colonies, the famous
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 179
Gallic Hercules who, with the chains of poetic gold (that is, grain) issuing from
his mouth, chains by the ears great multitudes of men and leads them after him
whither he will. This has hitherto been taken as a symbol of eloquence, but the
fable was born at a time when the heroes had as yet no articulate speech, as
has been fully shown above. (2) For the maritime colonies, the fable of the
net with which heroic Vulcan drags plebeian Venus and Mars from the sea (a
distinction of which a general explanation will be given later), so that the Sun
discovers them completely naked (that is, not clothed in the civil light with
which the heroes shone, as we have just stated), and the gods (the nobles of
the heroic cities, as explained above) laugh them to scorn (as the patricians
ridiculed the poor plebs of ancient Rome).
561 And lastly the asylums had here their first origin. Thus Cadmus
founds Thebes, the most ancient city of Greece, as an asylum. Theseus founds
Athens on the altar of the unhappy, for such was the appropriate epithet for the
impious vagabonds who were without all the divine and human blessings that
human society had afforded the pious. Romulus founds Rome by opening an
asylum in the grove, in the way in which the ancient cities of Latium had arisen;
for Livy defines it generally as an ancient counsel of founders of cities; where-
fore he is wrong, as we have seen above, in attributing to Romulus the saying
that he and his comrades were sons of that land. Yet Livy's phrase is to our pur-
pose in that it shows that the asylums were the origins of the cities, whose eternal
property it is that men live secure from violence in them. In this way, from the
multitude of impious vagabonds who everywhere repaired to the lands of the
pious and strong and found safety there, came Jove's gracious title, the hospitable.
For these asylums were the first hospices in the world, and those who were
there received were the first guests or strangers of the first cities, as we shall
later see. And among the many labors of Hercules poetic Greek history pre-
served these two: how he went about the world slaying monsters, men in aspect
but beasts in their habits, and how he cleansed the filthy Augean stables.
562 In this connection gentile poetic imagination created two other major
divinities, Mars and Venus. The former was a [poetic] character of the heroes
as first and properly fighting for their altars and hearths, fro arts et facts. This
sort of fighting was always heroic, for it was fighting for their own religion,
upon which mankind falls back when all natural help is despaired of. Whence
the wars of religion are most sanguinary. Libertines, too, as they grow older,
turn to religion, for they feel nature failing them. It was for these reasons that
we took religion for the first principle of our Science. Now Mars fought on truly
real fields and behind truly real shields, which, from cluer, were called by the
Romans first clupei and later clypei; just as from the time of the returned bar-
barism pastures and enclosed woods have been called defenses. And these shields
were charged with true arms, which at first, before there were arms of iron, were
simply poles with their ends burnt and then tapered to a point and given sharp
edges to make them suitable for inflicting wounds. Such were the simple spears,
i8o THE NEW SCIENCE
without iron tips, which were given as military prizes to the Roman soldiers
for heroic conduct in war. Hence among the Greeks the spear is borne by
Minerva, Bellona and Pallas [Athena]. And among the Latins, from quirts,
"spear," Juno is called Quirina and Mars Quirinus; and Romulus, because in
life he excelled with the spear, was called Quirinus after his death. Similarly the
Roman people, who were armed with javelins (as the Spartans, the heroic people
of Greece, were armed with spears), were called Quirites in solemn assembly. But
the barbarian nations, Roman history tells us, used to fight with the primitive
spears we are speaking of, and it describes them for us as praeustas sudes, ''burnt-
tip spears," similar to those the American Indians were found to wield. And in
our own times the nobles are armed with spears in the tournaments, as they
formerly used them in war. The invention of this sort of weapon proceeded from
a just idea of strength, as it were elongating the arm and thus using the body to
ward off harm from the body: whereas the arms that are held close to the body
belong rather to beasts.
563 We learned above that the lower ends of the fields where the dead
were buried were the first shields in the world, whence m the science of heraldry
the shield is the ground or escutcheon of the arms. The colors of the fields were
true colors. The black came from the burnt fields to which Hercules had set
fire. The green from the fields of grain in leaf. And it was by an error that the
gold was taken as a metal, for it was the yellowing of the standing grain as it
ripened that made the third color of the earth, as we have said before. Thus the
Romans, among their heroic military prizes, charged with grain the shields of
soldiers who had distinguished themselves in battle, and military glory was
called adorea from ador, the parched grain which was their primitive food. The
ancient Latins called it adur, from uro, "to burn," so that perhaps the first adora-
tion in religious times was the burning of grain. Blue was the color of the sky
with which these clearings were covered, which is why bleu is French for "blue,"
"sky," and "God," as we have said above. Red was from the blood of the im-
pious thieves slain by the heroes when found in their fields. The noble arms
which have come down to us from the returned barbarism are observed to be
charged with many lions, black, green, gold, blue, and finally red. These, ac-
cording to what we have seen above of the fields of grain that later became fields
of arms, must be the cultivated lands, viewed under the aspect, set forth above,
of the lion overcome by Hercules, with their above enumerated colors. Many are
charged with vairs, which must be the furrows whence sprang the armed men
of Cadmus, sprouting from the dragon's teeth he had sown after slaying the
monster. Many are charged with pales, which must be the spears with which the
first heroes waged war. And finally many are charged with rakes, which are
clearly agricultural implements. From all this we must conclude that agriculture
was the first foundation of nobility not only in the first barbarian times, as we
ascertain from the Romans, but also in the second.
564 The shields of the ancients were covered with leather, as we learn
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 181
from the poets that the old heroes dressed in leather, that is, in the hides of the
beasts they hunted and killed. On this there is a fine passage in Pausanias where
he says that leather clothing was invented by Pelasgus (an ancient hero of Greece
after whom the people of that nation were first called Pelasgians, and whom
Apollodorus in his De origine deorum calls autochthonous or son of earth, or,
in a word, a giant). And there is a striking correspondence between the first and
second barbarian times, for Dante, speaking of the grand old personages of the
second, says they were clothed in leather and bone, and Boccaccio too relates
that they went about wrapped in leather. This must have been the reason for
covering the family arms with leather, and the curling into scrolls of the skin
of head and feet is an appropriate finishing touch. The shields were round be-
cause the cleared and cultivated lands were the first orbes tcrrarum, as above
noted; and this characteristic survived among the Romans, whose clypeus was
round, in distinction from their scutum, which had corners. Every clearing was
called a lucus in the sense of an eye, as even today we call eyes the openings
through which light enters houses. The true heroic phrase that "every giant had
his lucus" [clearing or eyej was altered and corrupted when its meaning was
lost, and had already been falsified when it reached Homer, for it was then taken
to mean that every giant had one eye in the middle of his forehead. With these
one-eyed giants came Vulcan to work in the first forges that is, the forests to
which Vulcan had set fire and where he had fashioned the first arms, which
as we have seen were the spears with burnt tips and, by an extension of the
idea of arms, to forge bolts for Jove. For Vulcan had set fire to the forests in
order to observe in the open sky the direction from which Jove sent his bolts.
565 The other divinity born among these most ancient human things was
Venus, a [poetic] character of civil beauty, whence honestas had the meanings
of nobility, beauty and virtue. For this is the order in which these three ideas
must have been born. The first to be understood was the civil beauty which ap-
pertained to the heroes. Then the natural beauty which is apprehended by the
human senses, but only by those of men of perception and comprehension, who
know how to discern the parts and grasp their harmony in the body as a whole,
in which beauty essentially consists. This is why peasants and men of the squalid
plebs understand little or nothing of beauty (which shows the error of the
philologians who say that in these simple and stupid times of which we are
speaking kings were chosen for their handsome and well-proportioned bodies;
for this tradition is to be understood as referring to civil beauty, which was the
nobility of the heroes, as we shall shortly state). And lastly the beauty of virtue,
which is called honestas and is understood only by philosophers. Hence it must
have been the civil beauty that was possessed by Apollo, Bacchus, Ganymede,
Bellerophon, Theseus and other heroes, and perhaps on their account Venus was
imagined as male [androgynous].
566 The idea of civil beauty must have been engendered in the minds
of the theological poets when they saw that the impious creatures who had
1 82 THE NEW SCIENCE
taken refuge on their lands were men in aspect but brute beasts in their habits.
It was this civil beauty and no other that was cherished by the Spartans, the
heroes of Greece, who cast down from Mt. Taygetus the ugly and deformed off-
spring, that is, those borne by noble women but without benefit of solemn
nuptials. Such too must have been the monsters condemned by the Law of the
Twelve Tables to be thrown into the Tiber. For it is not at all likely that the
decemvirs, in that parsimony of laws proper to the first commonwealths, would
have given any thought to natural monsters, because of whose extreme rarity
anything rare in nature is called monstrous, when even in the abundance of
laws with which we are now afflicted, legislators leave to the discretion of judges
those cases that seldom present themselves. Such then must have been the
monsters which were first and properly called civil. (It is one of these that
Pamphilus had in mind when, under the false suspicion that the maiden
Philumena was pregnant, he says: Aliquid monstri alunt, "Something monstrous
is a-breeding.") And so they continued to be called in the Roman laws,
which must have spoken with all propriety, as Antoine Favre observes in his
lurisprudentiac paptniancac scientia, and as we have already remarked above in
another connection.
567 This must be what Livy has in mind when, with as much good
faith as ignorance of the Roman antiquities of which he writes, he says that
if the nobles shared connubtum with the plebeians the resulting offspring
would be secum ipsa discors, which is as much as to say a monster of mixed and
twofold nature, the one heroic, of the nobles, the other feral, of the plebeians who
"practiced marriages like those of wild animals" (agitabant connubia more
jerarum). This phrase {secum ipsa discors} Livy took from some ancient writer
of annals and used it ignorantly, for he quotes it as if it meant "if the nobles
intermarried with the plebeians." But the plebeians in their miserable state of
quasi slavery could not ask any such thing of the nobles. What they demanded
was the right of contracting solemn nuptials (for such is the meaning of con-
nubium), which right was at that time confined to the nobles. But among
animals no species has intercourse with another. We must therefore say that
[secum ipsa discors] was a phrase of insult applied by the nobles to the plebeians
in that heroic contest. For inasmuch as the latter did not possess the public
auspices, whose solemnities were required to make marriages legitimate, none
of them had an ascertained father (by the well-known definition in Roman law
that nuptiae demonstrant patrem, "the marriage ceremony identifies the father"),
and with reference to this uncertainty the plebeians were said by the nobles to
have intercourse with their mothers and daughters as beasts do.
568 To the plebeian Venus, however, were attributed the doves, not to
signify passionate love but because they are, as Horace describes them, degencres,
base birds in comparison with eagles, which Horace calls feroces; and thus to
signify that the plebeians had private or minor auspices as contrasted with those
pf the eagles and thunderbolts possessed by the nobles and called by Varro and
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 183
Messala major or public auspices. On the latter depended all the heroic rights of
the nobles, as Roman history plainly confirms. To the heroic Venus or Venus
pronuba, on the other hand, were attributed the swans which appertain also to
Apollo (who, as we saw above, was the god of the nobility), and under the
auspices of one of which Leda conceives the eggs by Jove, as set forth above.
569 The plebeian Venus was depicted as naked, whereas Venus pronuba
wore the girdle, as stated above. And here we may see how ideas concerning these
poetic antiquities have been distorted. For that [nakedness] was later taken as
an incentive to lust which in truth had been invented to signify the natural
modesty or the punctuality of good faith with which natural obligations were
fulfilled among the plebeians. For as we shall see shortly in the Poetic Politics
the plebeians had no part of citizenship in the heroic cities, and thus did not con-
tract obligations sanctioned by any bond of civil law to make their fulfilment
necessary. Hence to Venus were attributed the Graces, likewise nude; and among
the Latins caussa and gratia meant the same thing, so that the Graces must have
signified to the poets the pacta nuda or simple agreements which involve only
natural obligation. And thus those pacts which the Roman jurisconsults called
pacta stipulata were later described by the medieval interpreters as "vested."
For, understanding by nude pacts those not stipulated, they did not derive
stipulatio from stipes (for such an origin would have yielded sti patio), in the
forced sense of "that which sustains the pacts," but from stlpula as used by the
peasants of Latium for the blade which "clothes the grain." On the other hand,
the "vested pacts" of the early writers on feudal law were so called from the same
origin from which came the "investiture" of the fiefs, from which certainly
comes exjestucare, "to divest of [legal] standing." For the reasons set forth,
therefore, gratia and caussa were understood by the poetic Latins as having
the same meaning with respect to the contracts observed by the plebeians of the
heroic cities. Similarly, with the later introduction of contracts de iure naturali
gentium, "by the natural law of nations" (to which Ulpian adds humanarum f
"human" [nations]), caussa and negocium signified the same thing, for in
such kinds of contracts the transactions themselves are almost always caussae
or cavissae or cautelae which serve as stipulations to give security to the pacts.
[CHAPTER III]
COROLLARIES CONCERNING CONTRACTS SEALED BY
SIMPLE CONSENT
570 The heroic peoples were concerned only with the necessities of life.
The only fruits they gathered were natural fruits, as they did not yet understand
184 THE NEW SCIENCE
the use of money. They were so to speak all body. Hence the most ancient law
of the heroic nations could certainly take no cognizance of the contracts which
nowadays are said to be sealed by simple consent. They were extremely crude
people and therefore suspicious, for crudeness is born of ignorance and it is a
property of human nature that he who does not know is ever doubtful. For all
these reasons they did not recognize good faith, and they made sure of all ob-
ligations by a real or fictitious physical transfer. Moreover, the transfer was made
certain by solemn stipulations in the course of the transaction. Hence the cele-
brated article in the Law of the Twelve Tables: Si quis nexum jaciet mancipium-
que, uti lingua nuncupassit, ita ius esto, "if anyone executes a bond or convey-
ance, as he has declared with his tongue, so let it be binding." And from this
nature of human civil things the following truths emerge.
I
571 It is [rightly] said that the most ancient buying and selling was bar-
ter. In the case of real estate, however, the barter must have been of the kind
which in the returned barbarism was called libcllus or feudal leasehold. Its
utility was apparent from the fact that one man had more than enough fields
yielding an abundance of fruits which another man lacked, and vice versa.
II
572 The letting of houses could not be practiced as long as cities were
quite small and dwellings simple. Landlords must therefore have let out their
lands for others to build on; and thus the only rental was ground rent.
Ill
573 The letting of land must have been by emphyteusis, which the
Latins called clientela; whence the grammarians, by an inspired guess, said the
clientes had been so called as being colentes, "tillers."
IV
574 This must be the reason why, for the returned barbarism, the only
contracts we find in the old archives are leases for dwellings or farms, in per-
petuity or for limited periods of time.
V
575 This is perhaps the reason why emphyteusis is a contract de iure
civili, that is, by our principles, de iure heroico romanorum. To this Ulpian op-
poses the ius naturals gentium hutnanarutn, the natural law of human nations
as distinguished from that of the barbarous nations that had preceded them, not
from that of the barbarous nations outside the Roman empire in his own day,
for their law was 0f no importance to Roman jurisconsults,
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 185
VI
576 Partnerships were unknown, by that cyclopean custom whereby each
family father cared only for his own affairs and did not trouble himself with
those of others, as, above, Homer gave us to understand by what he has Poly-
phemus tell Ulysses.
VII
577 For the same reason mandates or contracts of agency were unknown.
The rule of ancient civil law was: Per extraneam personam acquiri nemini, "no
one may acquire by a person not under his power.'*
VIII
578 But when the heroic law was succeeded by what Ulpian defines as
that of the human nations, there was a revolutionary change. The contract of
purchase and sale, which in ancient times did rfot guarantee recovery unless
double recovery was stipulated in the contract, now became the queen of those
contracts called bonae fidei t "of good faith," and the right of recovery obtained
naturally even without stipulation.
[CHAPTER IV]
MYTHOLOGICAL CANON
579 Returning now to the three f poetic] characters, Vulcan, Mars and
Venus, it must be noted here (and this must be considered an important canon
of our mythology) that there were three divine characters signifying the heroes,
distinguished from three others signifying the plebeians. Vulcan splits Jove's
head with a hatchet to give birth to Minerva, attempts to interfere in a quarrel
between Jove and Juno, is kicked out of heaven by Jove, and is left lame. Mars,
in a stern reproof reported by Homer, is called by Jove "the vilest of all the
gods," and Minerva in the battle of the gods related by the same poet hurls a
stone at him and wounds him. (This Vulcan and this Mars must be the plebeians
who served the heroes in war.) And Venus (signifying the natural wives of the
plebeians) along with the plebeian Mars is trapped in the net of the heroic Vul-
can; and, being discovered naked by the Sun, they are made the butt of the
other gods. Hence Venus was erroneously believed to be the wife of Vulcan, but
we saw above that there was no marriage in heaven save that between Jove and
Juno, and that was sterile. And it was not said that Mars had committed adultery
1 86 THE NEW SCIENCE
with Venus but that she was his concubine, because among the plebeians there
were only natural marriages, as we shall show later, and these were called by
the Latins concubinages.
580 As we have explained these three characters here, so we shall explain
others in their proper places. Among them we shall find the plebeian Tantalus
who cannot reach the apples (which rise beyond his grasp) nor the water
(which sinks beneath the reach of his lips); the plebeian Midas dying of hun-
ger because all he touches turns to gold; and the plebeian Linus who contends in
song with Apollo and is vanquished and slain by the god.
581 Such double fables or characters must have been necessary in the
heroic state in which the plebeians, having no names of their own, bore those
of their heroes, as we have said above. To say nothing of the extreme poverty
of speech that must have obtained in the first times, when even in the abundance
of our present languages the same word often signifies different and sometimes
contrary things.
[SECTION V]
[POETIC POLITICS]
[CHAPTER I]
POETIC POLITICS, UNDER WHICH THE FIRST COMMONWEALTHS
IN THE WORLD WERE BORN IN A MOST SEVERELY
ARISTOCRATIC FORM
582 In this fashion, then, the families were founded with the jamuli
taken by the heroes under their faith, power, or protection. And these jamuh
were the first socii in the world, as we have seen above. Their lives were in the
hands of their lords, and consequently their acquisitions likewise. The heroes,
with their cyclopean paternal authority, had the right of life and death over
their own children, and, in consequence of this right over their persons, had
also a despotic right over ail their acquisitions. This was Aristotle's meaning
when he defined the children of a family as "animate instruments of their
fathers." And the Law of the Twelve Tables, even into the period of the most
unbounded popular liberty, preserved to the Roman family fathers both these
monarchical rights of power over the persons and dominion over the acquisi-
tions [of their children]. Indeed, until imperial times, sons, like slaves, had
only one kind of peculium or private property, namely peculium profectiaum
[that acquired by their father's consent]. In the earliest times the fathers must
have had the power of really selling their children as many as three times; for
later, with the progressive softening of human times, they made three pretended
sales when they wished to free their children from their paternal power. The
Gauls and the Celts, however, retained an equal power over slaves and children;
and the custom of fathers really selling their children was found in the West
Indies, and in Europe they are sold up to four times by the Muscovites and Tar-
tars. So true is it, forsooth, that other barbarous nations do not have paternal
authority talem qualem habent cives romani, such as Roman citizens have [Inst.
1.9.2]! This evident falsehood springs from the common vulgar error of which
the scholars have been guilty in interpreting this statement; for it was made by
1 88 THE NEW SCIENCE
the jurisconsults with reference to the nations conquered by the Roman people.
For such nations, as we shall later show at greater length, having lost all their
civil rights by the law of war, had left to them only natural paternal powers and,
consequently, natural blood ties called those of cognation; and similarly only
the natural property rights called bonitary; and hence on both these accounts
only the natural obligations said to be de iurc naturali gentium, which Ulpian
further specified as humanarum. But the civil rights these subject nations had
lost must all have been possessed by the peoples outside the Roman empire,
precisely as the Romans themselves had them.
583 To return to our argument: when the sons of the families were
freed by their fathers' death from this private monarchical rule, each son took
it up entire for himself, so that every Roman citizen when free of paternal power
is called a paterfamilias in Roman law. The famuli on the other hand went on
living in that servile state. After a long period of time they must naturally have
chafed under it, by the axiom set forth above [292] that "subject man naturally
aspires to free himself from servitude." Such must have been the Tantalus
above called plebeian, striving in vain to reach the fruit (the golden apples of
the grain raised on the lands of the heroes, as above explained), and unable to
slake his burning thirst with so much as a mouthful of the water which rises
to his lips only to sink away again. Such also were Ixion, forever turning the
wheel, and Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill. (Like the dragon's teeth sown by
Cadmus, this rock was the hard earth, and its rolling back when it reached the
top was preserved in the Latin phrases vertere terram for cultivating it and
saxum volvere for painfully performing a long and arduous task.) For all these
reasons the famuli must have revolted against the heroes. And this is that "neces-
sity" which we conjectured generally in the Axioms [261] to have been im-
posed by the famuli upon the heroic fathers in the state of the families, as a
result of which the commonwealths were born.
584 For at this point, under pressure of the emergency, the heroes must
naturally have been moved to unite themselves in orders so as to resist the multi-
tudes of rebellious famuli. And they must have chosen as their head a father
fiercer than the rest and with greater presence of spirit. Such men were called
reges, "kings," from regere, which properly means "to sustain" or "direct." In
this fashion, to use the well-known phrase of the jurisconsult Pomponius, "things
themselves dictating it, kingdoms were founded" (rebus ipsis dictantibus, regna
condita)\ a phrase in keeping with the doctrine of Roman law which declares
that the natural law of nations was established by divine providence (ius naturale
gentium divina providentia constituturn). Such was the generation of the heroic
kingdoms. And since the fathers were sovereign kings of their families, the
equality of their state and the fierce nature of the Cyclopes being such that no one
of them naturally would yield to another, there sprang up of themselves the
reigning senates, made up of so many family kings. These, without any human
discernment or counsel, were found to have united their private interests in a
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 189
common interest called patria, which, the word res being understood, means
"the interest of the fathers." The nobles were accordingly called patricians, and
the nobles must have been the only citizens of the first patriae or fatherlands.
In this sense we may regard as truthful the tradition that has come down to us
which says that in the earliest times kings were chosen by nature. On this point
there are two golden passages in Tacitus's Gcrmania [ch. 7], which give us
ground for conjecturing the same custom for all the other first barbarous peo-
ples. The first is that "their squadrons or battalions, instead of being formed
by chance or by a fortuitous gathering, are composed of families and clans."
And the second is that "their chiefs do more by example than by authority; if
they are energetic, if they are conspicuous, if they fight in the front, they lead
because they are admired.'*
585 Evidence that the first kings on earth were of this nature is afforded
by the fact that the heroic poets imagined Jove in heaven to have just such king-
ship over men and gods, as is shown by that golden passage in Homer where
Jove explains to Thetis that he can do nothing contrary to what the gods have
once determined in their great celestial council. Here speaks a true aristocratic
king. On this episode the Stoics later erected their dogma of a Jove subject to fate,
but in fact Jove and the other gods held council concerning the affairs of men and
freely determined them. And the passage we have cited explains two others
in Homer which political theorists have erroneously interpreted as Homeric
references to monarchy. In one of them Agamemnon reproves the stubborn
Achilles. In the other Ulysses persuades the Greeks, mutinous and desirous of
returning home, to continue the siege of Troy. In both passages it is said that
"one alone is king." But both passages refer to warfare, in which there is but
one commander-in-chief, by the maxim quoted by Tacitus [Annals I, 6] "the
condition of bearing rule is that an account cannot be balanced unless it is ren-
dered to one person" (earn cssc imperandi conditionem, ut non aliter ratio
constet quam si urn reddatur). Moreover, Homer himself, as often as he men-
tions the heroes by name in his two poems, adds the fixed epithet "king." In
striking harmony with this is a golden passage in Genesis in which Moses,
enumerating the descendants of Esau, calls them all kings, or rather, as the Vul-
gate has it, duces, "captains." Likewise the ambassadors of Pyrrhus report having
seen in Rome a senate of so many kings. And in fact one cannot conceive in
civil nature any reason why the fathers, in such a change of forms of government,
should have altered anything of what they had had in the state of nature, save
to subject their sovereign family powers to these reigning orders of theirs. For
the nature of the strong, as we have set forth above in the Axioms [261], is to
surrender as little as possible of what they have acquired by valor, and only so
much as is necessary to preserve their acquisitions. Hence we read so often in
Roman history of that heroic disdain of the strong wl\ich will not suffer an
ignominious surrender of what has been won by valor (virtute parta per
flagitium amittere) . And among all human possibilities, once we have seen that
190 THE NEW SCIENCE
civil governments were not born cither of fraud or of the violence of a single
man (a$ we have already shown and shall show more fully later), one cannot
imagine any way but the one we have described by which civil power could
emerge from family authority, or the eminent domain of civil states from the
paternal natural domains (which, as we have indicated above, were ex iurc
Optimo in the sense of being free of every private or public encumbrance).
586 This development which we have established by reason is strikingly
confirmed by the origins of the words relating to it. For on this dominium
optimum or unencumbered domain of the fathers (called di^aion ariston by the
Greeks) were erected the commonwealths which (as noted above) were called
aristocratic by the Greeks, and by the Romans commonwealths of the optimates,
so called from Ops, goddess of power. Perhaps for this reason Ops was called
Jove's wife (from whom he must have been called optimus, for he is aristos to
the Greeks and hence optimus to the Latins), the wife, that is, of the reigning
order of those heroes who, as noted above, had arrogated to themselves the name
of gods. (For Juno by the law of the auspices was the wife of Jove understood
as the thundering sky.) The mother of these gods, as said above, was Cybele,
also called mother of the giants properly so called in the sense of nobles, and
she was later taken, as we shall see in the Poetic Cosmography, for the queen of
cities. From Ops, then, came the term optimates, for all such commonwealths
are ordained to preserve the power of the nobles, and to preserve it they retain
as eternal properties two principal custodies, one of the orders, the other of the
frontiers. Under the custody of the orders came first the custody of the families,
by which the Romans down to the 3O9th year of the city excluded the plebs
from connubium. Then the custody of the magistracies, by which the patricians
so strongly contested the claim of the plebs to the consulship. Then the custody
of the priesthoods, and finally, by its means, the custody of the laws, which all
the first nations regarded as sacred. Whence down to the Law of the Twelve
Tables the nobles governed Rome by custom, as we were assured by Dionysius
of Halicarnassus in the Axioms [284], and for a century afterwards the inter-
pretation of that Law was kept within the college of pontiffs, according to the
jurisconsult Pomponius, because until then that college was open only to nobles.
The other principal custody is that of the frontiers, in which connection the Ro-
mans, until their destruction of Corinth, had observed an incomparable justice
in war in order not to militarize the plebeians, and an extreme clemency in vic-
tory in order not to enrich them. On this we have set forth two axioms above
[273-276].
587 This great and important tract of poetic history is all contained in
the fable of Saturn seeking to devour the infant Jove, and the priests of Cybele
concealing him and by the clash of their arms preventing his infant cries from
being heard. Here Saturn must be a character of the famuli, who as day laborers
till the fields of their masters, the heroic fathers, and with ardent longing seek
fields from the fathers on which they may find sustenance for themselves. And
BOOK H. POETIC WISDOM 191
this Saturn is the father of Jove because from this Saturn, as its occasion, was
born the civil government of the fathers which, as we said before, was set forth
in the character of that Jove whose wife was Ops. For Jove taken as the god of
the auspices, of which the most solemn were the thunderbolt and the eagle the
Jove whose wife was Juno is the father of the gods, that is, of the heroes. For
they believed themselves sons of Jove, as having been engendered under his aus-
pices in solemn nuptials, of which Juno is the goddess, and so they took the name
of gods, whose mother is Earth, that is, Ops, the wife of this Jove, as has all been
said above. And this same Jove was called king of men, that is of the famuli in
the state of the families and of the plebeians in that of the heroic cities. These
two divine titles [father and king], through ignorance of this poetic history,
have been confused, as if Jove were also the father of men. But men [famuli and
plebeians] down into the days of the ancient Roman republic could not name
their fathers (non poterant nomine ciere patrcm), as Livy says, because they
were born of natural marriages and not of solemn nuptials; whence jurisprudence
retained the maxim: Nuptiae demonstrant patrem, "The marriage ceremony
identifies the father."
588 The fable goes on to relate that the priests of Cybele or Ops (for the
first kingdoms were everywhere priestly, as we have said above and shall show
more fully later) conceal Jove. (From this concealment Latin philologians guess
the name Latium must have come, and the Latin language preserved the history
in its phrase condcrc regna, as we said before, for the fathers formed a closed
order against the mutinous famuli, and the secrecy of this order was the source
of what political theorists called arcana imperii.) And by the clash of their arms
they prevent Saturn from hearing the wailing of Jove (newly born to the union
of that order), and thus they save him. In this way the same thing is distinctly
narrated that Plato stated so obscurely, that "the commonwealths were born on
the basis of arms." To this may be added what Aristotle told us above in the
Axioms [271], that in the heroic commonwealths the nobles swore eternal en-
mity against the plebs. And there remained from all this the eternal property
expressed in the saying that servants are the paid enemies of their masters. The
Greeks preserve this history for us in the etymology of polemos, "war," from
polls, "city."
589 In this connection the Greek nations imagined the tenth divinity
of the gcntes maiorcs, namely Minerva. And her birth was fancied in this wild
and uncouth fashion: Vulcan, it was said, split with an axe the forehead of Jove,
whence sprang Minerva. By this they meant to signify that the multitude of
famuli practicing servile arts (which, as we have said, came under the poetic
genus of the plebeian Vulcan) broke (in the sense of weakening or diminishing)
the rule of Jove. (The Latins used for this the expression minucre caput, "to
split the head," because, not being able to express rule as an abstraction, they
used the concrete word for "head.") For Jove's rule in the state of the families
had been monarchic, and they changed it to aristocratic in the state of the cities,
192 THE NEW SCIENCE
Hence it is not an unlikely conjecture that Minerva's name was derived from
minuerc, nor that from this most ancient poetic antiquity came the phrase in
Roman law, capitis dcminutio, in the sense of change of form of government, as
Minerva changed the state of the families into that of the cities.
590 To this fable the philosophers later attached the most sublime of
their metaphysical meditations: that the eternal idea in God is generated by God
himself, while created ideas are produced in us by God. But the theological poets
contemplated Minerva under the idea of civil order, whence order was the Latin
term par excellence for the senate (which perhaps led the philosophers to consider
it an eternal idea of God, who is naught else than eternal order); and thence
there remained the eternal property that the order of the best is the wisdom of
cities. However Minerva in Homer is always distinguished by the fixed epithets
warlike and predatory, and only twice do we recall having found her called
counselor. And the owl and the olive were sacred to her not because she spends
the night in meditation and reads and writes by the light of the lamp, but rather
to signify the dark night of the hiding places in which, as we have said above,
humanity had its beginnings, and perhaps more properly to signify that the
heroic senates that composed the cities conceived their laws in secret. Certainly
it remained the custom of the Areopagites to give their votes under cover of
darkness in the senate of Athens, the city of Minerva, whom the Greeks called
Athena. From this heroic custom came the Latin phrase condere leges, so that
legum conditores properly signified the senates that commanded the laws, and
If gum latores those who carried the laws from the senates to the plebs of the
various peoples, as we have noted above in the case of Horatius. How far the
theological poets were from considering Minerva the goddess of wisdom appears
from the statues and medals in which she is always shown as armed, and from
the fact that the same goddess was Minerva in the curia, Pallas in the plebeian
assemblies (for example in Homer it is Pallas who leads Telemachus, about to
depart in search of his father Ulysses, into the assembly of the plebs, whom he
calls the "other people"), and lastly Bellona in warfare.
591 It must be said that the erroneous belief that Minerva was under-
stood as wisdom by the theological poets is of a piece with the other error that
the curia was so called from curanda respublica at a time when the nations were
confused and stupid. The word must rather have been derived by the most
ancient Greeks from chcir, "hand," in the form \yria, whence curia in Latin.
We may infer as much from one of the two great fragments of antiquity
(entered in the Chronological Table and mentioned in the Notes upon it [77])
which, to our good fortune, Denis Petau found embedded in Greek history be-
fore the heroic age of Greece and consequently in what the Egyptians called the
age of the gods, which we are here investigating.
592 One of these fragments relates that the Hcraclids or descendants
of Hercules had been scattered through the whole of Greece, even in Attica
where Athens was, and had later retired to the Peloponnesus where Sparta was,
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 193
an aristocratic commonwealth or kingdom under two kings of the race of Her-
cules, called Heraclids or nobles, who administered laws and conducted wars
under the supervision of the ephors. The latter were guardians not of popular
but of aristocratic liberty. They had king Agis strangled because he had tried to
bring to the people a law wiping out debts, which Livy [XXXII, 38] calls "a
firebrand for inflaming the plebs against the optimates" (facem ad acccndcndum
advcrsus optimates plebcm), and another concerning testaments which would
have diverted inheritances outside the order of the nobles, within which they
had previously been kept by the law of legitimate succession; for only the nobles
had had sui heredes, agnates, or gentiles [no]. There had been similar
attempts at Rome before the Law of the Twelve Tables, as will be shown later.
And just as men like [Spurius] Cassius, [Manlius] Capitolinus, the Gracchi and
other leading citizens of Rome were declared traitors and executed by the
senate for attempting with like laws to raise up somewhat the poor oppressed
plebs of Rome, so Agis was strangled by the ephors. So far were the ephors of
Sparta from being, as Polybius represents them, guardians of the popular liberty
of Lacedaemon. Thus Athens (named for Minerva, whom they called Athena)
must have had in its earliest times an aristocratic form of government; and Greek
history has faithfully recounted as much, telling us (as noted above) that Draco
reigned in Athens at the time when it was occupied by the optimates. And this
is confirmed by Thucydides [i.e. Isocrates], who tells us that as long as the city
was governed by the severe Arcopagites it shone with the finest heroic virtues
and carried out the worthiest enterprises, just as Rome did in the time when, as
we shall see later, it was an aristocratic commonwealth. (Juvenal renders their
name "judges of Mars" in the sense of armed judges, though Ares, Mars, -f
pege, in Latin pagus, a country or its people, might better have been rendered
"the people of Mars," as the Roman people were called; for at their birth the
peoples were composed only of nobles, who alone had the right to bear arms.)
But Athens was cast down from this lofty state by Pericles and Aristides in
favor of popular liberty, and Rome suffered a like fate beginning with Sextius
and Canuleius, tribunes of the plebs.
593 The other great fragment tells how the Greeks traveling abroad ob-
served the Curetcs or priests of Cybele scattered through Saturnia or ancient
Italy, through Crete, and through Asia; so that everywhere among the first
barbarous nations there must have prevailed kingdoms of Curetes, correspond-
ing to the kingdoms of the Heraclids scattered through ancient Greece. These
Curetes were the armed priests who by the clashing of their arms muffled the
cries of the infant Jove whom Saturn sought to devour in the fable we were just
explaining.
594 It follows from our entire argument that the first comitia curiata
must have had their origin at this most ancient point of time and in this way.
They arc the oldest comitia we read of in Roman history. They had to be held
under arms, and they were continued for the purpose of dealing with sacred
194 THE NEW SCIENCE
things, for in the earliest times all profane matters were seen under this aspect.
Livy wonders that such assemblies were held in Gaul at the time when Han-
nibal passed through. But Tacitus in his Germania tells us that they were also
held by priests, who dealt out penalties in the midst of arms as if in the presence
of their gods. This showed a just sense of the fitness of things, for the heroic
assemblies were armed for dealing out penalties because the supreme authority
of the laws follows the supreme authority of arms. And speaking generally
Tacitus tells us that the Germans conducted all their public affairs under arms
and presided over by priests, as we have just said. Hence among the ancient Ger-
mans, whose custom allows us to assume the like for all the first barbarous peo-
ples, we find the kingdom of the Egyptian priests; we find the kingdoms of the
Curetes or armed priests which prevailed, as we have seen, among the Greeks of
Saturnia or ancient Italy, of Crete and of Asia; we find the Quirites of ancient
Latium.
595 In view of what has been set forth, the law of the Quirites must have
been the natural law of the heroic peoples of Italy, which, to distinguish it from
that of the other peoples, was called ius Qutntium Romanorum. This did not
come about through any pact made between the Sabines and the Romans that
they should be called Quirites from Cures, the capital city of the Sabines, for
in that case they would have been called Curetes, the name used by the Greeks
of Saturnia. And if the capital of the Sabines had been called Ceres (as the Latin
grammarians will have it), they should rather have been called (and note the dis-
tortion of ideas!) Cerites, a name applied to those Roman citizens who were con-
demned by the censors to bear the burdens while having no part of civil honors,
just as were the plebs who were composed of the jamuli, as we shall presently
see, at the birth of the heroic cities. It was with the mass of the plebs that the
Sabines must have been merged in those barbarous times when conquered cities
were destroyed and the survivors scattered over the plains and forced to till the
fields for the conquering peoples a fate that the Romans did not spare even
the mother city of Alba. Such [conquered neighbor cities] were the first prov-
inces, so called as if for prope victac "near conquered" (for example, Corioli,
for the conquest of which Marcius was called Coriolanus), as on the other hand
the last or farthest provinces were so called as being procul victac, "far con-
quered." And in such plains were settled the first inland colonies, called in all
propriety coloniae deductae, that is, bands of peasant day laborers led down
from above; whereas in the case of the last or farthest colonies deductae meant
just the opposite, for, from the low and cramped quarters of Rome where the
poor plebeians must have dwelt, they were led to high and strong places in the
provinces, to keep them in order, to be lords therein, and to change the existing
lords of the fields into poor laborers. In this way, according to Livy who saw
only the effects, Rome grows on the ruins of Alba, and the Sabines bring to their
Roman sons-inJaw the wealth of Ceres as the dowry of their abducted daugh-
ters, as Florus vainly remarks. And these are the colonies before those which
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 195
came after the agrarian laws of the Gracchi. Livy says the Roman plebs, in the
heroic contests, they carried on with the nobility, disdained, or rather resented,
these first colonies because they were not of the same kind as the last; and be-
cause they did nothing to raise up the Roman plebs, and Livy finds that they
even added fuel to the contests, he offers these vain reflections upon them.
596 Finally, that Minerva had signified armed aristocratic orders is at-
tested by Homer where he tells of Minerva wounding Mars with a stone in the
course of their contest. (Mars, as we saw above, was the [poetic] character of
the plebeians who served the heroes in war.) And again where he tells of
Minerva attempting a conspiracy against Jove, which is after the manner of
aristocracies, in which the lords by secret counsels overthrow their chiefs when
the latter affect tyranny. It is only in this time that we read of statues being
erected to the slayers of tyrants; whereas if the latter had been monarchical
kings, as commonly supposed, their slayers would have been accounted traitors.
597 Thus the first cities were made up solely of nobles, who were in com-
mand. But because they had need of others to serve them, by a common sense of
utility the heroes were constrained to satisfy the multitude of their aroused
clients; hence they sent to them the first embassies, which by the law of nations
are sent by sovereigns. And they sent them with the first agrarian law in the
world, under which, as the strong do, they conceded to the clients the least they
could, which was bomtary ownership of the fields the heroes might choose to
assign to them. Thus it may be true that Ceres discovered both grain and laws.
This law was dictated by the following natural law of nations: since ownership
follows power, and since the lives of the famuli were dependent on the heroes
who had saved them by granting them asylum, it was lawful and right that they
should have a similarly precarious ownership, which they might enjoy as long
as it suited the heroes to maintain them in possession of the fields they had
assigned to them. Thus the famuli merged to form the first plebs of the heroic
cities, in which they had none of the privileges of citizenship. It is just like one
of these that Achilles declares he has been treated by Agamemnon when the
latter wrongfully takes Briseis from him, for he says he has suffered an outrage
which would not have been committed against a laborer without any rights of
citizenship.
598 Such were the Roman plebeians down to the struggle over con-
nubium. For when, by the second agrarian law, conceded to them by the nobles
in the Law of the Twelve Tables, they had gained quiritary ownership of the
fields, as we showed many years ago in our Principles of Universal Law (in one
of the two passages on whose account we do not regret the publication of that
book), yet, because by the law of nations strangers were not capable of civil
ownership, and the plebeians were not yet citizens, they were still unable to leave
their fields intestate to their kin, because they did not have sui hcrcdes, agnates,
or cognates, which relations were all dependent on solemn nuptials. Nor
could they even dispose of their fields by testament, for they were not citizens.
1 96 THE NEW SCIENCE
Hence the lands assigned to them soon returned to the nobles, from whom they
had had the title to their ownership. When they had become aware of this,
within three short years they demanded the right of connubium. In the condi-
tion of miserable slaves that Roman history clearly relates that of the plebeians
to have been, they did not demand the right of intermarrying with the nobles,
for in that case the Latin would have read connubia cum patribus. What they
did ask was the right to contract solemn nuptials just as the fathers did, and so
they demanded connubia patrum, the principal solemnity of which was the pub-
lic auspices called by Varro and Messala- major auspices, those meant by the
fathers when they said the auspices were theirs. The plebeians, in making this
demand, were in effect asking for Roman citizenship, whose natural principle
was solemn nuptials, which were therefore defined by the jurisconsult Modestinus
as the sharing of every divine and human right (omnis divini ct humani iuris
communlcatio) , than which no more proper definition can be given of citizenship
itself.
[CHAPTER II]
ALL COMMONWEALTHS ARE BORN FROM CERTAIN
ETERNAL PRINCIPLES OF FIEFS
599 In such fashion, in part from the nature of the strong to preserve
their acquisitions, and in part from the nature of the benefits which can be
looked for in civil life, on which two natures of human things we said in the
Axioms [260-262] the eternal principles of fiefs were founded, the common-
wealths were born in the world with three kinds of ownership for three kinds of
fiefs, which were held by three kinds of persons over three kinds of things.
600 The first was bonitary ownership of rustic or human fiefs, which
the "men" (those whom Hotman is surprised to find called vassals in the feudal
laws of the returned barbarism), that is, the plebeians, had of the fruits on the
farms of their heroes.
601 The second was quiritary ownership of noble, heroic or armed fiefs,
nowadays called military; for the heroes, when they united themselves in armed
orders, kept their sovereignty over their farms. This was what had been in the
state of nature the best ownership, which Cicero, as we said before, recognizes
in his DC aruspicum responses as held over a few houses still remaining in the
Rome of his day, and which he defines as "ownership of real estate free of any
real encumbrance whether private or public." On this there is a golden passage
in the Pentatcuc^i, where Moses relates that in the time of Joseph the priests of
Egypt did not pay the king tribute on their fields. And we have pointed out not
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 197
far back that all the heroic kingdoms were priestly, and we shall demonstrate
shortly that at first the Roman patricians did not pay the treasury any tribute on
their fields. When the heroic commonwealths were formed, these sovereign
private fiefs naturally became subject to the higher sovereignty of the reigning
heroic orders (each community of which was called a f atria with res understood,
meaning "interest of the fathers"), which was to be defended and maintained
because it had preserved their sovereign family powers on a basis of mutual
equality; and this is the sole mark of aristocratic liberty.
602 The third, with full propriety called civil ownership [= eminent
domain], was that which the heroic cities, composed in the beginning of heroes
only, had over the lands by certain divine fiefs which the family fathers had
previously received from the provident divinity, as we have shown above (in
virtue of which they had found themselves sovereigns in the state of the families,
and had united themselves in reigning orders in the state of the cities); and thus
they became sovereign civil kingdoms subject to the supreme sovereign God,
whose providence is recognized by all sovereign civil powers. This is made
plain to human understanding by the explicit avowal of sovereign powers
in adding to their titles of majesty such phrases as "by divine providence" or u by
the grace of God," through which they must publicly profess to have received
their kingdoms. So that if worship of providence were forbidden, the natural
consequence would be their fall, for a nation of fatalists or casualists or atheists
never existed in the world, and we saw above that all the nations of the world,
through four primary religions and no more [paganism, Judaism, Christianity,
Islam], believe in a provident divinity. So the plebeians swore by the heroes,
and such oaths have survived as mchcrculesl mecastor! aedepoll and medius-
fidius! "by the god Fidius!" who, as we shall see, was the Roman Hercules; but
the heroes swore by Jove. For the plebeians were at first in the power of the
heroes (the noble Romans, down to the 4iQth year of the city, exercised the right
of private incarceration over their plebeian debtors), while the heroes, who
formed the ruling orders, were in the power of Jove by reason of the auspices.
If the auspices seemed to permit, the heroes appointed magistrates, enacted laws
and exercised other sovereign rights; if they seemed to forbid, they abstained.
All this is that fides deorum ct hominum, "faith of gods and men," to which
pertain the Latin phrases implorare fidem, "to implore help and aid"; recipere
in fidcm, "to receive under protection or authority"; and the exclamation proh
dc&m atque hominum fidcm implorol used by the oppressed to implore on their
behalf the "force of gods and men," which the Italians rendered in the human
sense "the power of the world." For this power in virtue of which civil powers
arc so called, this force, this faith, for which the oaths just quoted attest the
veneration of the subjects, and this protection which the powerful must extend
over the weak (in which two things lies the essence of feudalism), are the
force which sustains and rules this civil world. The center of this force was
sensed if not rationally understood by the Greeks (as we have noted in the
i 9 8 THE NEW SCIENCE
medals of their commonwealths) and by the Latins (as we have observed in
their heroic phrases) to be the ground of each civil sphere. Even today the
crowns of sovereign powers are surmounted by a sphere, on which is implanted
the divine symbol of the cross. The sphere, as we have shown above, is the
golden apple, signifying the high dominion which sovereign powers have over
the lands of which they are lords; and for this reason it is placed in the left
hands of sovereigns in the midst of the solemn rites of coronation. Hence it must
be said that civil powers are masters of the substance of their peoples, which sus-
tains, contains and maintains all that is above it and rests upon it. In virtue of
its being one part of this substance a part taken pro indhiso or as an undivided
whole (to use the scholastic expression for a legal distinction) in the Roman
laws the patrimony of each family father is called substantia patris or paterna
substantia. This is at bottom the reason why sovereign civil powers may dispose
of whatever belongs to their subjects: their persons as well as their acquisitions,
their works and their labors, and impose thereon tribute or taxes, whenever
they have to exercise that dominion over their lands which, from different points
of view but with the same meaning in substance, moral theologians and writers
on public law now call eminent domain, just as they now speak of the laws
concerning this domain as the fundamental laws of the realm. Since this do-
minion is over the lands Ihemselves, sovereigns naturally may not exercise it
save to preserve the substance of their states, on whose stability or collapse
hinges the stability or ruin of all the private interests of their peoples.
603 The Romans had an intuitive sense if not a rational understanding
of the origin of commonwealths in these eternal principles of fiefs. This is shown
by the formula they had for laying claim to a piece of land, which has come
down to us as follows: Aio hunc jundum meum esse ex iure quiritium, "I declare
this piece of land to be mine by the law of the Quirites." By this formula they
brought the civil action of vindication to bear on the ownership of the land,
an ownership depending on the state and proceeding from the, so to speak, cen-
tral power by which every Roman citizen is the recognized master of his estate
and owns it pro indiviso (to use the scholastic phrase for a purely legal distinc-
tion), and for that reason called ownership ex iure quiritium, "by the law of the
Quirites," who, as shown by a thousand proofs already adduced or to be adduced,
were originally the Romans armed with spears in public assembly who com-
posed the city. This is the basic reason why the lands and all goods (for all
spring from the land), when they have no owner, revert to the public treasury;
for every private patrimony pro indiviso is public patrimony, and therefore, in
default of private owners, it loses its designation as a part and retains only that
of the whole. This must be the reason for the technical legal expression by which
inheritances, particularly on the part of heredes legitimi [those entitled at law in
the absence of sui heredes], are said to return (redire) to the heirs, though in
truth they come to them but once. For those who founded Roman law in the
process of founding the Roman commonwealth itself gave to all private patri-
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 199
monies the status of fiefs, such as writers on feudal law describe as ex facto ct
providentia, meaning that they all come from the public patrimony and, by
pact and providence of the civil laws, devolve from one private owner to another,
and in default of private owners must return to the source from which they
came. All this that we have been saying is clearly confirmed by the [provisions
of the] Lex Papia Poppaea concerning lapsed legacies. This law imposed on
celibates the just penalty that, because they had neglected to propagate their
Roman name through matrimony, if they had made testaments they were to be
declared null and void, and further they were to be considered as having no
relatives who could inherit ab intestato. In both directions, therefore, they were
deprived of heirs to preserve their names, and their patrimonies reverted to the
public treasury, in the quality not of an inheritance but of a peculium accruing,
in the phrase of Tacitus, to the people as the parent of all, tamquam omnium
parentem. By which phrase this profound writer recalls the reason of all the
caducary penalties from the most ancient times when the first fathers of the
human race occupied the first vacant lands. Such occupation was the original
source of all ownership in the world. Later these fathers, uniting in cities,
created the civil power out of their paternal powers, and out of their private
patrimonies created the public patrimony called the acrarium or public treasury.
The patrimonies of the citizens pass from one private owner to another in the
quality of inheritances, but, on reverting to the public treasury, they resume
their ancient original quality of peculium.
604 Here, at the generation of their heroic commonwealths, the hero
poets imagined the eleventh major divinity, Mercury. It is he who carries the
law to the mutinous famuli in his divine rod (a real word for the auspices), the
same rod with which, as Vergil tells, he brings back souls from Orcus. (That is,
he restores to social life the clients who, having left the protection of the heroes,
were again being scattered and lost in the lawless state which is the Orcus of
the poets, waiting to swallow all men, as will be explained later.) The rod is
described for us as having one or two serpents wound about it. (These must
have been serpent skins signifying the bonitary ownership granted to the famuli
by the heroes, and the quiritary ownership they reserved for themselves.) There
are two wings at the top of the rod (signifying the eminent domain of the heroic
orders), and the cap worn by Mercury is also winged (to confirm their high
and free sovereign constitution, as the cap remained a hieroglyph of liberty).
In addition, Mercury has wings on his heels (signifying that ownership of the
fields resided in the reigning senates). He is otherwise naked (because the
ownership he carried to the famuli was stripped of all civil solemnity and based
entirely on the honor of the heroes) just as we have seen Venus and the Graces
depicted as naked. Thus from the bird of Idanthyrsus, by which he meant to
say to Darius that he was sovereign lord of Scythia in virtue of the auspices he
had there, the Greeks took the wings to signify heroic constitutions; and finally,
in articulate speech, the Romans used the abstract expression "the auspices are
200 THE NEW SCIENCE
ours" to show the plcbs that all the heroic civil laws and rights belonged to them-
selves. So that this winged staff of the Greek Mercury, with the serpents re-
moved, is the eagle-headed scepter of the Egyptians, Etruscans, Romans and
finally the English, as we have said above. The staff was called \ery\eion by the
Greeks because it carried the agrarian law to the famuli of the heroes, called
f(cryj(es by Homer. It brought also the agrarian law of Servius Tullius ordering
the census, so that peasants who came under it are spoken of as censiti in the
Roman laws. By its serpents it brought the bonitary ownership of the fields, and
the land rent paid by the plebeians to the heroes, as we have pointed out above,
was called opheleia, from of his, "serpent." Lastly it brought the famous Her-
culean knot, by which men paid the tithe of Hercules to the heroes, and plebeian
Roman debtors down to the time of the Petelian law were "bound" or liege vas-
sals of the nobles. On all these matters we have much to say farther on.
605 Here it must be added that this Greek Mercury was the Thoth or
Mercury who gives laws to the Egyptians, represented by the hieroglyph of
Knef. He is described as a serpent, to denote the cultivated land. He has the
head of a hawk or eagle, as the hawks of Romulus later became the Roman
eagles, representing the heroic auspices. He is girt by a belt as a sign of the
Herculean knot, and in his hand he bears a scepter, which signifies the reign
of the Egyptian priests. He Wears a winged cap, as an indication of their eminent
domain over the land. And finally he holds an egg in his mouth, which stood
for the sphere of Egypt, if indeed it is not the golden apple which, as we have
shown above, signified the eminent domain the priests held over the lands of
Egypt. Into this hieroglyph Manetho read the generation of the entire world,
and the conceit of the learned reached such an absurd extreme that Athanasius
Kircher in his Obeliscus pamphilius affirms that this hieroglyph signifies the
Holy Trinity.
606 Here began the first commerce in the world, from which this Mer-
cury got his name. He was later regarded as the god of trade, as from his first
mission he was held to be the god of ambassadors, and with evident truth it was
said that he had been sent by the gods (an appellation, as we have seen, applied
to the heroes of the first cities) to men (a name Hotman was amazed to find
applied to vassals in the returned barbarism). The wings, which we have noted
as signifying heroic constitutions, were later thought to have been used by Mer-
cury to fly from heaven to earth and then to return from earth to heaven. But,
to return to commerce, it began with this kind of immovable goods [real estate],
and the first payments were, as they could not fail to be, of the most simple and
natural sort, that is to say in the produce of the land. Similar payments in labor
or goods are still customary in the transactions of peasants.
607 All the above history was preserved by the Greeks in the word nomos,
signifying both law and pasture; for the first law was the agrarian law in ac-
cordance with which the heroic kings were called shepherds of the people, as
we have indicated above and as we shall later explain more fully.
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 201
608 Thus the plebeians of the first barbarous nations (in the same fashion
as among the ancient Germans described by Tacitus, who mistakenly thought
they were slaves, for, as we have shown, the heroic socii were like slaves) must
have been scattered about the countryside by the heroes and have dwelt there in
their houses in the fields assigned to them, and by the produce of the farms have
contributed whatever was needful to the sustenance of their masters. And to
these conditions we must add the oath also quoted from Tacitus above re-
quiring them to guard and defend their masters and to serve to their glory. If
we look for a legal name to define such relationships, we shall see clearly that
there is none that fits them better than our term feudalism.
609 In this fashion the first cities were found to have been based on orders
of nobles and multitudes of plebeians, with two contrary eternal properties
emerging from this nature of human civil things which we are discussing:
namely, [ i ] that the plebeians always want to change the form of government,
as in fact it is always they who do change it, and [2] that the nobles always
want to keep it as it is. Hence, in the vicissitudes of civil governments, all those
who bend their efforts to maintaining the state are called optimates, and states
themselves are so called from this property of standing firm and upright.
610 Here appeared two divisions. The first was that between the wise
and the vulgar; for the heroes founded their kingdoms on the wisdom of the
auspices, as we stated in the Axioms [250] and as we have fully discussed above.
As a result of this division the vulgar received the fixed epithet profane, for the
heroes or nobles were the priests of the heroic cities, as certainly they were among
the Romans as late as a century after the Law of the Twelve Tables, as we have
stated above. Hence the first peoples when they took away citizenship used a
kind of excommunication, such as the interdict of water and fire among the
Romans, as we shall show later. For the first plebs of the nations were con-
sidered foreigners, as we shall presently see, and from this came the eternal
property of not granting citizenship to a man of alien religion. And because
the plebeians in the first cities, as we have set forth above, had no share in sacred
or divine things and for many centuries did not contract solemn matrimony,
the term vulgo quaesiti came to be used for illegitimate children.
6n The second division was that between citizen and hostis, which
meant both guest or stranger and enemy, for the first cities were composed
of heroes and of those received in their asylums (which we must suppose all
heroic hospices to have been). Similarly the returned barbarian times left in
Italian ostc for innkeeper and for soldiers' quarters, and ostello for inn. Thus
Paris was the guest, that is to say enemy, of the royal house of Argos, for
he kidnaped noble Argive maidens, represented by the [poetic] character of
Helen. Similarly Theseus was the guest of Ariadne, and Jason of Medea. Both
abandoned the women and did not marry them, and their actions were held to
be heroic, while to us, with our present feelings, they seem, as indeed they are,
the deeds of scoundrels. In like fashion must the piety of Aeneas be defended, for
202 THE NEW SCIENCE
he abandoned Dido whom he had violated (to say nothing of the great kind-
nesses he had received from her and the magnanimous offer she had made of
the kingdom of Carthage as dowry for their marriage) in order to obey the
fates who had ordained Lavinia in Italy, though she too was a stranger, as his
wife. This heroic custom was preserved by Homer in the person of Achilles,
the greatest of the Greek heroes, who refuses to accept any of the three daughters
whom Agamemnon offered him in marriage with the royal dowry of seven
lands well populated with ploughmen and shepherds, and replies that his wish
is to marry whatever woman in his fatherland his father Peleus may give him.
In brief, the plebeians were guests in the heroic cities, and against them, to
repeat our frequent quotation from Aristotle, the heroes swore eternal enmity.
This same division is expressed for us in the terms citizen and peregrine, taking
the latter in its original and proper sense of a man wandering through the coun-
try, as if peragrinus from ager in the sense of territory or district (as in such
phrases as ager neapolitanus, ager nolanus}\ whereas those strangers who travel
through the world do not wander through the country but hold straight to the
public highways.
612 The origins herein set forth of heroic guests shed a great light on
Greek history where it relates that the Samians, Sybarites, Troezenians, Amphi-
politans, Chalcedonians, Cnidians and Chians had their commonwealth?
changed from aristocratic to popular by strangers. And they give the final touch
to what we printed many years ago in our Principles of Universal Law concern-
ing the fable that the Law of the Twelve Tables came from Athens to Rome,
which is one of the two passages that permit us to believe that that work was
not entirely useless. For in the article De jorti sanate nexo soluto [I, 5], which
we proved to have been the subject of that whole contest [between plebeians
and nobles], the Latin philologians have said that the fortes sanate s were the
strangers reduced to obedience. Hence they were the Roman plebs which had re-
volted because they could not obtain from the nobles the certain ownership of
the fields. For, as long as the nobles retained the royal power of taking them
back again, the ownership could not have lasting certainty unless the law grant-
ing it was fixed eternally on a public tablet, determining the rights that had been
uncertain and manifesting those that had been secret. This is the true meaning
of what Pomponius tells us. It was on this account that the plebs raised such a
turmoil that it was necessary to create the decemvirs. These officials gave a new
form to the state and brought the rebellious plebs back to obedience by proclaim-
ing them (in the aforesaid article) free from the true bond of bonitary owner-
ship by which they had been bound to the soil (glebae addicti, adscriptitii or
censhi) under the census of Servius Tullius, as we have shown above, and bound
only by the fictitious knot of quiritary ownership. But a vestige of the old bond
remained until the Petelian law in the right of private imprisonment the nobles
had over their plebeian debtors. These were the strangers who under tribunitial
incitements, to use Livy's elegant phrase (incitements enumerated in our Note
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 203
on the Publilian law [104-114]), finally changed the Roman state from aristo-
cratic to popular.
613 The fact that Rome was not founded on the first agrarian revolts
shows us that it must have been a new city, as history tells. It was indeed founded
on the asylum where Romulus and his companions, while violence still pre-
vailed everywhere, must first have made themselves strong and then received
the refugees and founded the clienteles whose nature we have described above.
About two hundred years must have passed before the clients found their con-
dition burdensome, for it was just this length of time that elapsed before king
Servius Tulhus brought them the first agrarian law. In the ancient cities this
period must have extended to five hundred years for the reason that they were
composed of simpler men and Rome of a more calculating sort. This is the
reason why Rome subjugated Latium, then Italy, and then the world, because
their heroism was more youthful than that of the other Latins. It is also the
primary reason (as we said in the Axioms [158]) why the Romans wrote their
heroic history in the vulgar language, whereas the Greeks had written theirs in
fables.
614 All that we have thought out concerning the principles of poetic
politics and seen illustrated in Roman history is strikingly confirmed by these
four heroic characters: first, the lyre of Orpheus or Apollo; second, the head
of Medusa; third, the Roman fasces; fourth and last, the struggle of Hercules
with Antaeus.
615 First, the lyre was invented by the Greek Mercury, just as law was
invented by the Egyptian Mercury. This lyre was given him by Apollo, god of
civil light or of the nobility, for in the heroic commonwealths the nobles dictated
the laws, and with this lyre Orpheus, Amphion and other theological poets, who
professed knowledge of laws, founded and established the humanity of Greece,
as we shall later explain at greater length. So that the lyre was the union of the
cords or forces of the fathers, of which the public force was composed which is
called civil authority, which finally put an end to all private force and violence.
Hence the law was defined with full propriety by the poets as lyra regnorum,
"the lyre of kingdoms," in which were brought into accord the family kingdoms
of the fathers which had hitherto been in disaccord because they were all isolated
and divided from one another in the state of the families, as Polyphemus told
Ulysses. This glorious history was later raised to the heavens and described in
the constellation of the Lyre; and the kingdom of Ireland, on the arms of the
king of England, charges its shield with a harp. The philosophers afterwards
took it for the harmony of the spheres attuned by the sun; but it was on earth
that Apollo played the harp that Pythagoras not only could but must have heard,
or rather played himself, if we take him as a theological poet and nation founder
instead of the imposture he has hitherto been accused of being.
616 The snakes joined in the head of Medusa, whose temples bear wings,
are the high family domains the fathers had in the state of the families, which
204 THE NEW SCIENCE
later went to make up the civil eminent domain. This head was nailed to the
shield of Perseus, which is the same as that borne by Minerva, who, among the
arms (that is, in the armed assemblies) of the first nations (among which we
found that of Rome), dictates the frightful punishments that turn the specta-
tors to stone. We noted above that one of these snakes was Draco, who is said
to have written his laws in blood, because Athens (Athena being [the Greek]
Minerva) was armed with them at the time when it was occupied by the opti-
mates, as we have also said above. And among the Chinese, who still write
in hieroglyphics, the dragon, as we have also seen above, is the sign of civil
authority.
617 The Roman fasces are the litui or rods of the fathers in the state
of the families. For one such staff in the hand of one of these fathers the pregnant
word scepter is used by Homer, and the father is called a king. This is in his
description of the shield of Achilles, which contains the history of the world. In
this passage the epoch of the families is placed before that of the cities, as will
be fully set forth later. Having taken the auspices with these litui, the fathers
dictated the prescribed punishments to their children, such as that of the impious
son which passed into the Law of the Twelve Tables, as we have seen above.
Hence the union of these rods or litui signifies the generation of the civil au-
thority we are here discussing.
618 Finally Hercules (a character of the Heraclids or nobles of the heroic
cities) struggles with Antaeus (a character of the mutinous famuli) and, by
lifting him into the air (leading the famuli back into the first cities on the
heights), conquers him and binds him to the earth. From this came a Greek
game called the knot, after the Herculean knot by which Hercules founded the
heroic nations and by reason of which the plebeians paid to the nobles the tithe
of Hercules, which must have been the census [tax] which was the basis of the
aristocratic commonwealths. Hence the Roman plebeians under the census of
Servius Tullius were next or bondsmen of the nobles and, by the oath Tacitus
tells us was sworn by the ancient Germans to their princes, they were bound
to serve them as impressed vassals at their own expense in war; a duty the
Roman plebs still complained of under what has been supposed to have been
popular liberty. These must have been the first tribute-payers (assidui), who
fought at their own expense (suis assibus mtlitabant)\ but they were soldiers
not of fortune but of harsh necessity.
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 205
[CHAPTER III]
THE ORIGINS OF THE CENSUS AND THE TREASURY
619 The plebeians continued to be oppressed by the usurious exactions
and the frequent usurpations of their fields by the nobles, to such a point that
at the end of the period [Marcius] Philippus, tribune of the plebs, cried out in
public that two thousand nobles possessed all the fields that should be divided
among a good three hundred thousand citizens, the number counted at Rome
in his time. Beginning forty years after the expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus,
in the comfortable assurance of his death, the nobility had again begun to be in-
solent toward the unhappy plebs. The senate of those days had been obliged
to put into practice an ordinance requiring the plebeians to pay into the public
treasury the census [tax] which previously they had had to pay privately to the
nobles, in order that thenceforth the treasury should be able to take care of the
costs of war. From this time the census acquires new prominence in Roman
history. According to Livy the nobles disdained the administration of it as
something unworthy of their dignity. But Livy failed to understand that the
nobles did not want it because it was not the census ordained by Servius Tul-
lius, which had been the basis of the liberty of the lords and had been paid pri-
vately to them, for Livy, like all the other authorities, was under the false im-
pression that the census of Servius Tullius had been the basis of popular liberty.
For certainly there was no magistracy of greater dignity than the censorship,
which from the first year had been administered by the consuls. In this fashion
the nobles, through their own avaricious machinations, came themselves to set
up the census, which later was the basis of popular liberty. So that when the
fields had all fallen into their hands in the time of Philippus the tribune, these
two thousand nobles had to pay the tribute for three hundred thousand other
citizens then counted (just as in Sparta all the land had come into possession
of the few), because in the treasury there was a register of the census taxes which
the nobles had privately imposed on the fields which, in an uncultivated state,
they had of old allotted to the plebeians for cultivation. On account of the in-
equality referred to there must have been great agitations and revolts among the
Roman plebs. These were quelled by Fabius with a most prudent measure which
earned him the name Maximus. He ordered that the whole Roman people should
be divided into three classes, senators, knights, and plebeians, and that the citi-
zens should be placed in these classes according to their means. This consoled
the plebeians, for the senatorial order which previously had consisted solely of
nobles and which held all the magistracies, could thenceforward be entered by
206 THE NEW SCIENCE
plebeians of wealth, and thus the regular avenue to all civil honors was open to
plebeians.
620 This development gives truth to the tradition that the census of
Servius Tullius was the basis of popular liberty, for in it the matter was pre-
pared and from it the occasions were born, as we set forth hypothetically above
in the Notes on the Chronological Table, in the passage on the Publilian law.
It was this ordinance, originating in Rome itself, that established the demcft
cratic commonwealth there, and not the Law of the Twelve Tables [supposed
to have been] brought there from Athens. Indeed, what Aristotle calls a demo-
cratic commonwealth is rendered in Tuscan by Bernardo Segni as a common-
wealth by census, meaning a free popular commonwealth. This is evident even
in Livy, for, ignorant as he was of the Roman form of government in those
times, he nevertheless states that the nobles complained that by that law they
had lost more in the city than they had gained abroad by force of arms in that
year, though it was a year of many great victories. And for this reason Publilius,
the author of the law, was called the people's dictator.
621 With popular liberty, in which the whole people constitute the city,
it came about that civil ownership lost its proper meaning of public ownership
(which had been called civil from the word city) and was dispersed among all
the private ownerships of the Roman citizens who together now made up the
Roman city. The dominium optimum or best ownership lost its above stated
original meaning of strongest ownership, not weakened by any real encum-
brance, even public, and survived in the meaning of owership of property free
of any private encumbrance. Quiritary ownership no longer signified such
ownership of a piece of land that if the client or plebeian lost possession of it the
noble from whom he had title to it was obliged to come to his defense. The first
auctores iuris or lawmakers in Roman law were those whose duty it was, in con-
nection with these clienteles ordained by Romulus and no others, to expound
to the plebeians these and no other laws. For indeed what [other] laws could
the nobles have been obliged to set forth to the plebeians, since the latter down to
the 309th year of Rome had no privilege of citizenship, and since the laws
themselves down to a century after the Law of the Twelve Tables had been
kept hidden from the plebs by the nobles in their college of pontiffs? So in
those days the nobles were auctores iuris in a sense which survived in the
laudatio auctoritatis by possessors of purchased lands when they are summoned
in a suit for recovery by others and "cite the authors" [from whom they have
title and] whom they wish to assist and defend them. Quiritary ownership now
meant private civil ownership capable of being defended by the action of rei
vindicatio, whereas bonitary ownership could be maintained by possession only.
622 In the same fashion and not otherwise, by the eternal nature of
fiefs, these things recurred in the returned barbarian times. Let us take for ex-
ample the kingdom of France. Here the various provinces now composing the
nation were sovereign seigniories of the princes subject to the king of that realm,
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 207
and the princes must have held their property without any public encumbrance.
Later, through succession, rebellion or failure of heirs, they were incorporated
into the kingdom, and all the property ex iure Optimo of the princes became
subject to public exactions. For the lands and houses of the kings, which con-
tained their royal chambers, having passed by marriage or concession to their
vassals, are now found subject to taxation and tribute. Thus in hereditary
kingdoms ownership ex iuie Optimo was gradually confused with private owner-
ship subject to public charges, just as the rise, which was the patrimony of the
Roman emperor, was gradually confused with the public treasury.
623 Our research into the census and the treasury has been the most
difficult of our investigations into Roman things, as we indicated in the Idea of
the Work [25].
[CHAPTER IV]
THE ORIGINS OF THE ROMAN ASSEMBLIES
624 Our studies show that the boule and the agora, the two above noted
heroic assemblies of which Homer speaks, must have corresponded respectively
to the Roman comitia cunata, the assembly by cunac which we read of as the
most ancient under the kings, and the comttia tnbuta or assembly by tribes. The
former were called cunata from quir, "spear," whose genitive quins was later
used as the nominative, in conformity with what we have set forth in our
Origins of the Latin Language [Scienza nuova, ist ed., Ill, 36]; just as from
cheir, "hand," which among all nations meant power, must have been derived
the Greek \yria, with the same meaning as the Latin curia. Hence came the
Curetes, who were priests armed with spears, for all the heroic peoples were
composed of priests and only the heroes had the right to bear arms. The Curetes,
as we have seen above, were found by the Greeks in Saturma or ancient Italy, in
Crete, and in Asia. Kyna in its ancient sense must have meant seigniory, just
as aristocratic commonwealths are now called seigniories. From the tyria of
these heroic senates came tyros for authority, but this authority, as we have
observed above and shall observe more closely, was that of ownership. From
these origins came the modern tyrios for "sir" and kyria for "madam," And as
the Greek Curetes came from cheir, so we saw above that the Roman Quirites
came from quir. Quirites was the title of Roman majesty given to the people in
public assembly, as we have also noted above in a passage in which, comparing
[the assemblies of] the Gauls and the ancient Germans with that of the Greek
Curetes, we observed that all the first barbarous peoples held their public assem-
blies under arms.
ao8 THE NEW SCIENCE
625 Thus the majestic title of Quirites must have been first used at a time
when the people consisted entirely of nobles, who alone had the right to arm.
Later, when Rome had become a popular commonwealth, the title passed to the
people including the plebeians. For the assemblies of the plebs, who at first did
not have the right to arm, were called comitia tributa from tribus, "tribe." And
among the Romans, just as in the state of the families the latter were so called
from the famuli, so in the later state of the cities the term tributum, "tribute,"*
came from tribus, "tribe," because the tribes of the plebeians met to receive the
orders of the reigning senate, the chief and most frequent of which were de-
mands upon the plebeians for contributions to the treasury.
626 Subsequently, however, Fabius Maximus introduced the [reformed]
census which divided the whole Roman people into three classes according to
the patrimonies of the citizens. Before this only the senators had been knights,
for in heroic times only nobles had the right to arm, and hence in Roman
history we read that the ancient Roman commonwealth was divided into fathers
and plebs. Thus in those days senator and patrician had been interchangeable
terms, and likewise plebeian and ignoble. And as there had thus been only two
classes of the Roman people, so there had been only two kinds of assembly: one
the curiata, consisting of fathers or nobles or senators, the other the tributa, con-
sisting of plebeians or the ignoble. But now that Fabius had divided the citizens
according to their means into the three classes of senators, knights and plebeians,
the nobles ceased to be a separate order in the city and were placed in one or an-
other of the three classes according to their wealth. From that time on patricians
were distinguished from senators and knights, and plebeians from the base-
born; and plebeians were no longer contrasted with patricians but with knights
and senators. A plebeian no longer meant a base-born person but rather a citizen
of small patrimony who might well be a noble; and on the other hand a senator
no longer meant a patrician but a citizen of ample patrimony who might well be
of low birth.
627 Consequently from that time on comitia centwiata, the assembly
by hundreds, was the term applied to the assemblies in which the entire Roman
people of all three classes came together to enact the consular laws among other
public business. Those assemblies were still called comitia tributa in which the
plebs alone enacted tribunitial laws. These were the plebiscites, at first so called
in the sense rendered by Cicero as plebi nota or laws published to the plebs. (An
example cited by Pomponius is Junius Brutus announcing to the plebs that the
kings have been forever expelled from Rome.) In monarchies the royal laws
might with equal propriety be called populo nota, "made known to the people."
On this account Baldus, as acute as he was lacking in erudition, expressed sur-
prise that the word plebiscitum should have been written with one s, since in the
sense of a law enacted by the plebs, it should have had two; the set turn being in
that case from schcor, not scio [and taking the genitive plcbis instead of the
dative plebi}.
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 209
628 Lastly, for the certainty of divine ceremonies, there remained the
comltia curiata or assemblies of the heads of the curiae alone, in which sacred
matters were dealt with. For in the time of the kings all profane matters were
regarded as sacred, and the heroes were everywhere Curetes or armed priests, as
we have said above. Hence, down to the last days of Rome, since paternal power
was still viewed as sacred (and its regulations are often called sacra f atria in the
laws), adoptions took place in these assemblies by leges curiatae.
[CHAPTER V]
COROLLARY
DIVINE PROVIDENCE IS THE ORDAINER OF COMMONWEALTHS AND AT THE
SAME TIME OF THE NATURAL LAW OF NATIONS
629 We have seen that the generation of commonwealths began in the
age of the gods, in which governments were theocratic, that is, divine. Later
they developed into the first human, that is the heroic, governments, here called
human to distinguish them from the divine. Within these human governments,
even as the mighty current of a kingly river retains far out to sea the momentum
of its flow and the sweetness of its waters, the age of the gods continued to run
its course, for that religious way of thinking must still have persisted by which
whatever men themselves did was attributed to the agency of the gods. (Thus
in the state of the families they made a Jove out of the reigning fathers; and out
of the same fathers as united in closed orders at the birth of the first cities they
made a Minerva; out of their ambassadors sent to the aroused clients they made
Mercury; and finally, as we shall shortly see, out of the corsair heroes they
made Neptune.) Herein is divine providence to be supremely admiied, for,
when men's intentions were quite otherwise, it brought them in the first
place to the fear of divinity (the cult of which is the first fundamental basis of
commonwealths). Their religion in turn led them to remain fixed on the first
vacant lands which they occupied before all others (and such occupation is the
source of all property rights). When the more robust giants had occupied lands
on the mountain tops where the perennial springs arise, providence ordained
that thus they should find themselves in healthful and defensible sites and with
abundance of water, so that they could safely stop there and put an end to their
wanderings; and these are the three qualities that lands must have in order for
cities later to arise upon them. Further, again by means of religion, providence
led them to unite with chosen women for constant and lifelong companionship;
hence the institution of matrimony, the recognized source of all authority.
210 THE NEW SCIENCE
Later, with these women, they were found to have established the families,
which are the seed-plot of the commonwealths. And finally, with the opening
of the asylums, they discovered that they had founded the clienteles. Thus the
elements were prepared from which, with the first agrarian law, the cities were to
be born, based on the two communities of men that composed them, one of
nobles to command, the other of plebeians to obey. (The latter are called by
Telemachus, in a speech in Homer, the "other people," which is to say a sub-
ject people, different from the reigning people which was made up of heroes.)
Hence emerges the subject matter of political science, which is nothing other
than the science of commanding and obeying in states. And at their very birth
providence causes the commonwealths to spring forth aristocratic in form, in
conformity with the savage and solitary nature of the first men. This form
consists entirely, as writers on political theory point out, in guarding the boun-
daries and the orders, so that peoples newly come to humanity might, by the
very form of their governments, continue for a long time to remain enclosed
within these boundaries and orders, and so forget the infamous and nefarious
promiscuity of the bestial and feral slate. But the minds of men were preoccu-
pied with particulars and incapable of understanding a common good; they
were accustomed never to concern themselves with the affairs of others, as
Homer makes his Polyphemus tell Ulysses (and in this giant Plato recognizes the
fathers of the families in the so-called state of nature preceding the civil state).
Providence therefore, by the aforesaid aristocratic form of their governments, led
them to unite themselves to their fatherlands in order to preserve such great
private interests as their family monarchies were (for this was what they were
entirely bent upon), and thus, beyond any design of theirs, they were brought
together in a universal civil good called commonwealth,
630 Now here, by those divine proofs we spoke of above in the Method,
let us consider and meditate on the simplicity and naturalness with which provi-
dence ordered these affairs of men, of which they said truly though in a false
sense that they were all the work of the gods. And let us consider in this con-
nection the immense number of civil effects which may all be traced to those four
causes which, as will be observed throughout this work, are the four elements
as it were of the civil universe; namely, religion, marriage, asylum and the
first agrarian law which we have discussed above. Then let us ask ourselves if,
among all human possibilities, so many and such various and diverse effects
could in any other way have had simpler or more natural beginnings among
those very men who are said by Epicurus to have been born of chance and by
Zeno to have been creatures of necessity. Yet chance did not divert them nor fate
force them out of this natural order. For at the point when the commonwealths
were to spring forth, the matter was all prepared and ready to receive the form,
and there came forth the formation of the commonwealths, composed of mind
and body. The prepared materials were these men's own religions, their own
languages, theif own lands, their own nuptials, their own names (clans or
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 211
houses), their own arms, and hence their own commands, their own magistrates,
and finally their own laws. And because these things were their own they were
completely free and therefore constitutive of true commonwealths. And all this
came about because all the aforesaid institutions had previously belonged to the
family fathers as monarchs in the state of nature. The fathers at this juncture,
by uniting themselves in an order, came to produce the civil sovereign power,
just as in the state of nature they had held the family powers, subject to no
one under God. This sovereign civil person was formed of mind and body. The
mind was an order of wise men, with such wisdom as could naturally exist in
that time of extreme crudeness and simplicity. Hence the eternal property of
commonwealths that without an order of wise men states may present the ap-
pearance of commonwealths, but are so many dead and soulless bodies. There
was also the body, formed of the head and lesser members. Hence this second
eternal property of commonwealths: that some men must employ their minds
in the tasks of civil wisdom, and others their bodies in the arts and crafts that
are needed in peace as well as in war. And there is a third eternal property:
that the mind should always command and the body should have perpetually
to obey.
631 Yet here is an even greater cause for marveling. By bringing about
the birth of the families (all of them born with some awareness of a divinity
although, because of their ignorance and disorder, none knew the true one), since
each family had its own religion, language, lands, nuptials, name, arms, govern-
ment and laws, providence had at the same time brought into being the na-
tural law of the gentes maiores, with all the aforesaid properties, to be used later
by the family fathers over their clients. In like fashion, in creating the common-
wealths, by means of the aristocratic form in which they arose, providence caused
the natural law of the gentes maiotes (or families), which had been formerly
observed in the state of nature, to be transformed into the natural law of the
gentes minor es (or peoples), to be observed in the time of the cities. For the
family fathers, to whom all the aforesaid prerogatives belonged to the exclusion
of their clients, at the time when they banded themselves together in a natural
order against the latter, came to confine all the aforesaid properties within
their civil orders against the plebs. In this consisted the severely aristocratic form
of the heroic commonwealths.
632 In this way the natural law of nations, which is now observed among
peoples and nations, was born as a property of the sovereign civil powers at the
birth of the commonwealths. So a people or nation that has not within itself a
sovereign civil power vested with all the aforesaid properties is not properly a
nation or people at all, rior can it exercise abroad in its relations with other
peoples or nations the natural law of nations, but both the law and its exercise
will fall to another people or nation superior to it.
633 What we have here set forth, added to what we have mentioned
above of the heroes of the first cities calling themselves gods, will explain the
212 THE NEW SCIENCE
meaning of the phrase iura a diis posita, "laws laid down by the gods," applied to
the dictates of the natural law of nations. But when the natural law of human
nations ensued, on which we have cited Ulpian several times above, and upon
which the philosophers and moral theologians based their understanding of the
natural law of fully unfolded eternal reason, the phrase was fitly reinterpreted
to mean that the natural law of nations was ordained by the true God.
[CHAPTER VI]
HEROIC POLITICS
634 All the historians date the beginning of the heroic age from the
corsair raids of Minos and from Jason's naval expedition to Pontus. It continued
through the Trojan war and the wanderings of the heroes and came to an end
with the return of Ulysses to Ithaca. Thus in those times the last of the major
divinities, Neptune, must have been created. This inference we base on, the
authority of the historians, reinforced by philosophical reasoning assisted by
several golden passages of Homer. The philosophic reason is that the naval
and nautical arts were the last inventions of the nations, since it took the flower
of genius to invent them; so much so that Daedalus, their inventor, remained
a symbol of genius itself, and daedala tellus is used by Lucretius in the sense of
"the ingenious earth." The Homeric passages to which we refer are in the
Odyssey. Whenever Ulysses makes a landing or is driven ashore by the tempest,
he always mounts a hill to look inland for a trace of smoke which will indicate
that the land is inhabited by men. These Homeric passages are reinforced by that
golden passage in Plato which we cited from Strabo above in the Axioms [296],
in which he tells of the horror the first nations long had of the sea. The reason
for this was pointed out by Thucydides where he says that through fear of
corsair raids the Greek nations were slow to come down and dwell on the
coasts. On this account Neptune is portrayed to us as armed with the trident
with which he made the earth shake. The trident must have been a great hook
for grappling ships. By a fine metaphor the hook is called a tooth, and the three
in the prefix means the superlative, as we have noted above. With this hook he
made the lands of men quiver in fear of his raids. Later, already in Homer's day,
he was believed to make the physical earth shake, and ir this opinion Homer was
followed by Plato with his abyss of waters which he placed in the bowels of
the earth, with what reason we shall show later.
635 Of such nature must have been the bull in the shape of which Jove
abducts Europa, and the Minotaur or bull of Minos by which he steals youths
and maidens from the shores of Attica (on which account "horns of ships"
BOOK U. POETIC WISDOM 213
survived in the sense of sails, as used by Vergil). Landsmen thus set forth in all
truth that the Minotaur had devoured their children, for to their horror and grief
they had seen them swallowed up by the ships. Thus too the Ore seeks to devour
Andromeda, lashed to the rock and petrified with terror (so Latin kept the
phrase tcrrorc defixus, "rigid with fear"); and the winged horse which Perseus
rides to her rescue must have been another corsair ship, as the sails were after-
wards called the wings of ships. Vergil too, who was acquainted with these
heroic antiquities, in speaking of Daedalus, inventor of ships, states that he
flics with the machine which he calls alarum rcmiglum, "the oarage of wings";
and Daedalus, we are told, was the brother of Theseus. Thus Theseus must be
a [poetic] character of the Athenian youths who, under the law of force practiced
on them by Minos, are devoured by hi3 bull or pirate ship. He is taught by
Ariadne (seafaring art) by means of the thread (of navigation) to escape from
the labyrinth of Daedalus (which, before those labyrinths which are the elegant
playthings of royal villas, must have been the Aegean Sea because of the great
number of islands it bathes and contains). Then, having learned the art from
the Cretans, he abandons Ariadne and returns with Phaedra, her sister (that is,
with a similar art). Thus he slays the Minotaur and frees Athens from the cruel
tribute imposed by Minos (which is to say, the Athenians in their turn took up
piratical raiding). And so, as Phaedra was the sister of Ariadne, Theseus was the
brother of Daedalus.
636 Apropos of these matters Plutarch in his life of Theseus says that
the heroes considered it a great honor and an added prestige to their arms to
be called robbers, just as in the returned barbarian times "corsair" was re-
garded as a title of nobility. It is said that the laws of Solon, who lived about
that time, permitted associations for purposes of piracy; so well did Solon under-
stand this complete humanity of ours in which pirates are not protected by the
natural law of nations. What is even more astonishing is that Plato and Aristotle
made robbery a species of hunting; and with these great philosophers of a most
civilized nation the ancient Germans, in their barbarism, are in agreement. For
among them, according to Caesar, robbery was not only not regarded as in-
famous but was reckoned among the exercises of valor by which those who were
not brought up to the practice of any art escaped from idleness. This barbarous
custom endured for such a long time afterwards among the most enlightened
nations that, according to Polybius, one of the terms of peace imposed by the
Romans on the Carthaginians was that they were not to pass Cape Pelorum in
Sicily either for piracy or for trade. Still the attitude of the Carthaginians and
Romans is of minor importance, for they themselves professed to be barbarians
in those days, as may be seen from several passages in Plautus in which he says
that he has turned the Greek comedies into a "barbarous tongue," meaning
Latin. What is more remarkable is that the highly civilized Greeks, in the times
of their most cultivated humanity, should have practiced such a barbarous
custom, which indeed provided them with almost all the subjects of their
214 THE NEW SCIENCE
comedies. It is perhaps because of this custom, still practiced by the inhabitants
against the Christians, that the coast of Africa facing us is called Barbary.
637 The principle of this oldest law of war was the inhospitality of the
heroic peoples which we have discussed above, for they looked on strangers as
perpetual enemies and rested their own reputation for power on keeping them
at the greatest possible distance from their frontiers (as Tacitus tells us of the
Suevi, the nation of greatest prestige among the ancient Germans). They thus
looked upon strangers as robbers, as we observed not far back. There is a golden
passage of Thucydides on this subject in which he remarks that down to his
time when travelers met on land or sea they would ask one another if they were
robbers, meaning foreigners. But as the Greeks became more civilized they
soon cast aside that barbarous custom and called barbarous all the nations that
retained it. It was in this sense that the name Rtirbaria remained in use for the
land of the Troglodytes, who were supposed to kill foreigners who crossed
their borders, as indeed even today there are barbarous nations in which this is
the custom. It is certain that civilized nations do not allow strangers to enter
without first asking permission.
638 To the nations that the Greeks called barbarous for this reason be-
longs the Roman. This we know from two golden passages in the Law of the
Twelve Tables. One is: Adyersus hostem aeterna auctoritas esto fill, 7], "against
a foreigner the right in property shall be everlasting." The other [II, 2] is re-
ported by Cicero [De off. 1.12.37]: Si status dies sit, cum hoste vemto, "if a day
has been appointed, let him appear with the stranger." Here the word hostts, on
the basis of a conjecture in general terms, is commonly taken as a metaphor for
the adversary in the lawsuit. But on this very passage Cicero makes the observa-
tion, very much to our point, that the ancients meant by hostis what was later
meant by pcregrmus. These two passages taken together give us to understand
that the Romans originally regarded strangers as eternal enemies at war. How-
ever, the said two passages must be understood as applying to those who were the
first hostcs in the world. These, as noted above, were the foreigners received
into the asylums, who later took on the quality of plebeians at the formation of
the heroic cities, as shown farther back. Thus the passage in Cicero means that
on the appointed day "the noble shall appear with the plebeian to claim his
farm for him," as we have also said above. Hence the "everlasting right of
property" mentioned in the same law must have been against the plebeians,
toward whom, as we learned from Aristotle in the Axioms [271], the heroes
swore eternal enmity. This heroic law kept the plebeians, however long in
possession, from usucapting any piece of Roman property, for title to such
property could pass only from noble to noble. This is a good part of the reason
why the Law of the Twelve Tables did not recognize simple possession. Only
later, when heroic law was beginning to fall into abeyance and human law was
gaining in strength, did the praetors assist the plebeians by [recognizing] simple
possession extra ordinem; for neither by express provision nor by any interpreta-
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 215
tion could they find in the Law [of the Twelve Tables] any basis for ordinary
judgments, whether strict or equitable. All this was because that Law held sim-
ple possession by a plebeian to be in every case at the pleasure of the nobles.
Moreover it took no notice of the underhand or violent acts of the nobles be-
cause of that other eternal property of the first commonwealths (on which
also we cited Aristotle in the Axioms [269]), namely that they had no laws con-
cerning private wrongs or offenses, which were left to the individuals them-
selves to settle by force of arms, as we shall show fully in Book IV. Among the
formalities of rei vindicatio there was a survival of this real force in the feigned
force which Aulus Gelhus called festucary, "exercised with a straw." All this is
confirmed by the interdict Unde vi granted by the praetor extra ordlnem because
the Law of the Twelve Tables did not take cognizance of private violence or
even mention it; and also by the actions DC vi bonorum raptor um and Quod
metus caussa, which came late and were likewise praetorian.
639 Now the heroic custom of holding strangers to be eternal enemies,
which was observed by each people privately in peace, when extended abroad,
took the form recognized as common to all the heroic nations of carrying on
eternal wars with each other, with continual looting and raiding. Thus from
the cities, which Plato tells us were born on the basis of arms, as we have seen
above, and began to govern themselves in military fashion before the existence
of such wars as are waged between cities, we get the term war itself; for the
Greek polemos, "war," is from polis, "city."
640 In proof of what we have said we must make this important observa-
tion: that the Romans extended their conquests and gained the victories they
won throughout the world on the basis of four laws by which they governed the
plebeians at home. In the barbarian provinces they made use of the clienteles of
Romulus, sending Roman colonists into them, who took the place of the previous
masters of the fields and made laborers of them. In the civilized provinces they
applied the agrarian law of Servius Tullius, granting them bomtary ownership
of the fields. In Italy they adopted the agrarian law of the Twelve Tables, grant-
ing them the quiritary ownership enjoyed by the lands called sola italica. And
to the municipia or towns which had earned better treatment they accorded
the right of connubium and the share in the consulship which had been extended
to their own plebs.
641 The eternal enmity between the first cities made declarations of
war unnecessary, and indiscriminate pillaging was regarded as lawful. In-
versely, when the nations had been weaned away from this barbarous custom,
undeclared wars came to be regarded as piracy, no longer recognized by the
natural law of the nations called human by Ulpian. This same eternal enmity
of the first peoples may also explain to us that the long time during which the
Romans had waged war on the Albans is to be understood as the entire previous
period in which both sides had subjected each other to the pillaging raids of
which we are here speaking. Hence it is more reasonable that Horatius should
2i6 THE NEW SCIENCE
have killed his sister because she was mourning the Curiatius who had abducted
her than that she should have been married to him. For Romulus himself could
not take a wife from among these same Albans; it in no way availed him that
he was of the royal house of Alba nor that he rendered his city a great service
by expelling the tyrant Amulius and restoring the legitimate king Numitor.
It is well worth noting that victory or defeat in war is decided by the issue of com-
bat between the parties principally interested. In the case of the Alban war this
lay between the three Horatii and the three Curiatii; in that of the Trojan
war, between Paris and Menelaus. When combat between the latter two was
indecisive, the Greeks and Trojans carried on the war to the end. In similar
fashion in the last barbarian period the princes would decide the quarrels of their
kingdoms by personal combat, on the issue of which the fortunes of their peoples
depended. Hence it is clear that Alba was the Latin Troy and Horatia the
Roman Helen (of whom the Greeks had a similar story reported by Gerard
Jan Vossius in his Rhetorica); and the ten years of the siege of Troy among
the Greeks must correspond to the ten years of the siege of Veii among the
Latins. In both cases we have a finite number standing for the infinity of all pre-
ceding time during which the cities had practiced eternal hostilities on each
other.
642 For the number system, because of its extreme abstractness, was the
last thing to be grasped by the nations (as in this work we set forth in another
connection). When their minds had further developed, the Latins used "six
hundred" for a number beyond reckoning (just as the Italians at first said "a
hundred" and later "a hundred and a thousand"), for the idea of the infinite
can be entertained only by the mind of a philosopher. Perhaps it is on this
account that the first peoples said "twelve" to signify a large number. For such
was the number assigned to the gods of the gentes maiores, though Varro and
the Greeks counted thirty thousand of them. Twelve also were the labors of
Hercules, which must have been countless. The Latins said there were twelve
parts of the as, though it can be infinitely divided. This must have been the
case also of the Law of the Twelve Tables, because of the infinite number of
laws which were subsequently from time to time inscribed on tables.
643 At the time of the Trojan war it must have been that, in that part
of Greece in which it was waged, the Greeks were called Achaeans. (They had
previously been called Pelasgians from Pelasgus, one of the most ancient heroes
of Greece, of whom we have spoken above.) The name Achaeans must then
have gone on spreading through all Greece (for it lasted down to the time of
Lucius Mummius, according to Pliny), even as through all later time they were
called Hellenes. Thus the propagation of the name Achaeans must have led by
Homer's time to the supposition that all the Greeks had been allied in that war,
just as the name of Germany, according to Tacitus, spread ultimately over all
that great part of Europe which was thus known by the name of those who had
crossed the Rhine, driven out the Gauls, and begun to call themselves Germans.
BOOK IL POETIC WISDOM 217
Thus the glory of this people spread their name over Germany, as the report of
the Trojan war spread the name Achaeans over all Greece. For the peoples in
their first barbarism were so far from knowing anything of alliances that not
even the peoples of offended kings would deign to take up arms to avenge them,
as we have observed with regard to the beginning of the Trojan war.
644 Only by understanding this nature of human civil affairs and in no
other way can we solve the amazing problem of Spain. For she was the mother
of many nations acclaimed by Cicero as most vigorous and warlike, and Caesar
found it so by experience, for in all other parts of the world, in which he was
everywhere victorious, he fought for the Empire, but in Spain alone he fought
for his life. Why then was it that after the fame of Saguntum (which made
Hannibal sweat for eight months on end, though he had at his disposal and still
fresh the entire forces of Africa, with which later though much reduced and ex-
hausted he won the battle of Cannae and came very close to holding a triumph
over Rome on the very Capitoline), and after the renown of Numantia (which
shook the glory of Rome, though she had already triumphed over Carthage,
and perplexed the valiant and wise Scipio, the conqueror of Africa), why was
it that Spain did not then unite all her peoples in an alliance to set up a world
empire on the banks of the Tagus? Her failure gave occasion for the unhappy
elogium of Lucius Florus, that she realized her strength only after the whole
country had been conquered part by part. (Tacitus, in his life of Agricola, mak-
ing the same observation of the Britons, who at that time were found to be
savage fighters, uses the equally apt expression: dum slnguli pugnant, universi
vincuntur, "while they fight singly, all are conquered.") For, so long as they were
not attacked, they remained like beasts within the dens of their confines and went
on living the savage and solitary life of the Cyclopes, which we have set forth
above.
645 The historians have been struck by the fame of heroic naval war-
fare and so blinded by it as not to take note of heroic land warfare, much less of
heroic politics by which in those times the Greeks must have governed them-
selves. But Thucydides, a most acute and discerning writer, has left us an item of
great significance. He tells us that the heroic cities were all without walls, as
Sparta continued to be in Greece, and Numantia, the Spanish Sparta, in Spain.
And, with their arrogant and violent natures, the heroes were continually ejecting
each other from their seats, as Amulius drove out Numitor and Romulus drove
out the former and restored the latter to the kingdom of Alba. So much do the
genealogies of the heroic royal houses of Greece and a continuous succession of
fourteen Latin kings give assurance to the chronologists in their calculations of
time! For in the recurrence of barbarism, when it was at its crudest in Europe,
we read of nothing more varying and inconstant than the fortune of kingdoms,
as we pointed out above in the Notes on the Chronological Table. Indeed
Tacitus most knowingly indicates as much in the opening words of his Annals:
Urbetn Romam principio regcs habuerc, "The city of Rome in the beginning
2i 8 THE NEW SCIENCE
was held by kings"; for he uses the verb for the weakest of the three degrees of
possession distinguished by jurisconsults: habere, tenere, possidere.
646 The conduct of civil affairs under such kingdoms is related to us by
poetic history in the numerous fables that deal with contests of song (taking
song in that sense of the verbs canere and cantarc in which they mean "to pre-
dict") and consequently refer to heroic contests over the auspices.
647 Thus the satyr Marsyas (the monster described by Livy as secum ipse
discors), when overcome by Apollo in a contest of song, is flayed alive by the
god (note the savagery of heroic punishments!). Linus, who must be a character
of the plebeians (for certainly the other Linus was a poet hero, being numbered
with Amphion, Orpheus, Musaeus and others), is slain by Apollo in a similar
contest of song. In both these fables the contest is with Apollo, the god of divinity,
that is, of the science of divination, or of the auspices; and we found above that
he was the god of the nobility also, since the science of the auspices, as we have
shown by so many proofs, belonged to the nobles alone.
648 The sirens, who lull sailors to sleep with their song and then cut
their throats; the Sphinx, who puts riddles to travelers and slays them on their
failure to find the solution; Circe, who by her enchantments turns into swine the
comrades of Ulysses (so that cantare, singing, was later understood in the sense
of practicing witchcraft,* as in the phrase cantando rumpitur anguis, "the snake
is burst by the singing"; whence magic, which in Persia must at first have
meant wisdom in divination by auspices, remained with the meaning of the
art of magicians, and their spells were known as incantations): all these portray
the politics of the heroic cities. The sailors, travelers and wanderers of these
fables are the plebeians who, contending with the heroes for a share in the
auspices, are vanquished in the attempt and cruelly punished.
649 In the same way Pan the satyr tries to seize the nymph Syrinx,
famous in song, as we have said above, and finds himself embracing only reeds;
and likewise Ixion, enamored of Juno, goddess of solemn nuptials, attempting to
embrace her finds only a cloud in his arms. Here the reeds signify the lightness
and the cloud the emptiness of natural marriage; hence from the cloud, the fable
tells, were born the centaurs, that is to say the plebeians, who are the monsters
of discordant natures that Livy speaks of, who steal their brides from the
Lapithae while the latter are still celebrating their weddings. So too Midas
(whom we found above to be a plebeian) wears concealed an ass's ears, and the
reeds that Pan seizes (that is, natural marriage) reveal them; just as the Roman
patricians made out to their plebeians that the latter were all monsters because
they practiced marriages like those of wild animals (ugitabant connubia more
ferarum).
650 Vulcan (who here must also be plebeian), attempting to interfere in
a contest between Jove and Juno, is precipitated from heaven by a kick of Jove
and is left lame as a result of it. This must refer to a struggle by the plebeians
to secure from the heroes a share in the auspices of Jove and the solemnized
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 219
marriages of Juno, in which, having been worsted, they came out lamed, that is,
humiliated.
651 So Phaethon, of the family of Apollo and hence regarded as a
child of the Sun, in attempting to drive his father's golden chariot (the cart of
poetic gold, that is, grain), strays from the accustomed paths leading to the
granary of the father of his family (that is, lays claim to ownership of the fields),
and is precipitated from heaven.
652 Most significant of all is the fall from heaven of the apple of discord
(the apple which, as we have shown above, signifies the ownership of the fields,
for the first discord arose over the fields which the plebeians wanted to cultivate
for themselves), and the quarrel of Venus (who must here be plebeian) with
Juno (of solemn nuptials) and Minerva (of authority). For, apropos of the
judgment of Paris, by good fortune we have a remark of [pseudo-] Plutarch in
his De vita ct pocsi Homcn [I, 5] to the effect that the two verses toward the
end of the Iliad [XXIV, 28-9] which refer to it, are not Homer's but by a later
hand.
653 Atalanta, by throwing away the apples of gold, defeats her suitors
in the race, just as Hercules, wrestling with Antaeus, overcomes him by lifting
him into the air, as we have set forth above. [The meaning here is that] Atalanta
first concedes to the plebeians the bonitary and then the quiritary ownership of
the fields while withholding connubium; just as the Roman patricians [con-
ceded] the first agrarian law of Servius Tullius and the second agrarian law of
the Twelve Tables, yet retained connubium as a prerogative of their own order
in the article Connubia incommumcata plebi sunto, "Solemnized marriages shall
be withheld from the plebs," which is a direct consequence of the article Auspicta
incommumcata plcbi sunto, "The auspices shall be withheld from the plebs."
Wherefore, three years later, the plebs began to lay claim to connubium too,
and, after a heroic contest of three years, succeeded in winning it.
654 The suitors of Penelope invade the palace of Ulysses (that is the
kingdom of the heroes), arrogate to themselves the title of kings, devour the
royal substance (having taken over the ownership of the fields), and seek to
marry Penelope (claiming the right to connubium). In some versions Penelope
remains chaste and Ulysses strings up the suitors like thrushes on a net of the
sort in which the heroic Vulcan caught the plebeian Mars and Venus. (That is,
Ulysses binds them to cultivate the fields like the laborers of Achilles, just as
Coriolanus sought to reduce the plebeians who were not satisfied with the
agrarian law of Servius Tullius to the condition of the laborers of Romulus, as we
have related above.) Again, Ulysses fights Irus, a poor man, and kills him (which
must refer to an agrarian contest in which the plebeians were devouring the
substance of Ulysses). In other versions Penelope prostitutes herself to the
suitors (signifying the extension of connubium to the plebs) and gives birth
to Pan, a monster of two discordant natures, human and bestial. This is pre-
cisely the creature secum ipse discors of Livy, for the Roman patricians told the
220 THE NEW SCIENCE
plebeians that, if they were to share with them the connubium of the nobles, the
resulting offspring would be like Pan, a monster of two discordant natures
brought forth by Penelope who had prostituted herself to the plebeians.
655 From Pasiphae, who has lain with a bull, is born the minotaur, a
monster of two diverse natures. This story must mean that the Cretans ex-
tended connubium to foreigners, who must have come to Crete in the ship
called a bull in which, as we explained above, Minos abducted youths and
maidens from Attica, and in which Jove had earlier abducted Europa.
656 The fable of lo is also to be assigned to this kind of civil history. For
Jove falls in love with her (is favorable to her with his auspices), and Juno be-
comes jealous (with that civil jealousy, explained above, with which the
heroes guarded their solemn nuptials) and has her watched by Argos of the
hundred eyes (that is, by the Argive fathers, each with his eye or clearing, that is,
his cultivated land according to the interpretation given above). Then Mercury
(who must here be a character of the mercenary plebeians), by the sound of
his pipe, or rather by his singing, lulls Argos to sleep (overcomes the Argive
fathers in the struggle for the auspices, by which the fortunes were sung or di-
vined in solemn nuptials), whereupon lo is changed into a cow and lies with
the bull with which Pasiphae had lain, and goes wandering into Egypt (that
is among those foreign 'Egyptians with whom Danaus had driven the Inachids
from the kingdom of Argos).
657 But Hercules in his old age becomes effeminate and spins at the
behest of lole and Omphale; that is, the heroic right to the fields falls to the plebs.
The heroes called themselves viri, men, in contrast to the plebeians, and viri in
Latin has the same meaning as heroes in Greek. Vergil uses the word em-
phatically in that sense at the beginning of his Aeneid: Arma virumque cano;
and Horace translates the first verse of the Odyssey: Die mihi, Musa, virum, Viri
continued among the Romans to signify husbands by solemn matrimony,
magistrates, priests and judges, for, in the poetic aristocracies, solemn matrimony,
magistracy, priesthood, and judgeship were all confined to the heroic orders.
Thus [the fable relates that] the heroic right to the fields was extended to the
plebeians of Greece, just as the Roman patricians conceded to their plebeians
the quiritary right by the second agrarian law, which was fought for and won in
the Law of the Twelve Tables, as shown above. Precisely in the same way in
the returned barbarian times feudal goods were called goods of the lance, and
alodial goods were called goods of the distaff, as we find in the laws of the
Angles. Hence the royal arms of France (in signification of the Salic law which
excludes women from inheriting that kingdom) are supported by two angels
clothed in dalmatics and armed with spears, and are adorned with the heroic
motto: JJlia non nent, "The lilies do not spin." So that just as Baldus, to our
good fortune, called the Salic Law ius gentium Gallorum, "the law of the Gallic
nations," so we may apply the term ius gentium romanorum to the Law of the
Twelve Tables inasmuch as it rigorously confined intestate succession to sui
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 221
heredes, agnates and gentiles. For we shall show later how little truth there
is in the belief that in the early times of Rome there had existed a custom
whereby daughters could succeed to their fathers ab intestato, and that this
custom had passed into law in the Twelve Tables.
658 Finally Hercules breaks into a fury on being stained by the blood of
the centaur Nessus the same plebeian monster of two discordant natures
mentioned by Livy that is, in the midst of civil fury he extends connubium to
the plebs and is contaminated by plebeian blood and so dies, even as the god
Fidius, the Roman Hercules, dies with the Petelian law called DC nexu. By this
law vinculum fidei victum est, "the bond of faith was broken," although Livy
connects it with an event occurring a decade later but similar in substance to
the event which had given occasion to the Petelian law, an event in which it was
necessary that the matter of the aforesaid phrase should be put into execution and
not simply decreed. Livy must have found the phrase in some ancient chronicler
whom he follows with as much good faith as ignorance. For when the plebeian
debtors were freed from private incarceration by their noble creditors, debtors
were still constrained by judicial decisions to pay their debts, but they were
released from the feudal law, the law of the Herculean knot, which had had
its origin in the first asylums of the world, the bond by which Romulus had
founded Rome in his asylum. It seems very likely, therefore, that the chronicler
had written vinculum Fidti, the bond of the god Fidius, whom Varro asserts to
have been the Roman Hercules, and that later historians, not understanding
the phrase, erroneously read the word as fidei. The same heroic natural law is
found among the American Indians, and in our world it still obtains among the
Abyssinians of Africa and the Muscovites and Tartars of Europe and Asia. It was
practiced with greater mildness by the Hebrews, among whom debtors served
only seven years.
659 And, to conclude, in like manner Orpheus, the founder of Greece,
with his lyre or cord or force, which signify the same thing as the knot of Her-
cules (the knot with which the Petelian law was concerned), met his death at
the hands of the Bacchantes (the infuriated plebs), who broke his lyre to pieces
(the lyre being the law, as we have so often shown above); so that already in
Homer's time the heroes were taking foreign women to wife, and bastards were
coming into royal successions, showing that Greece had already begun to
countenance popular liberty.
660 From all this we must conclude that these heroic contests gave the
name to the heroic period; and that in these contests many chieftains, vanquished
and humbled, were obliged to take to the sea with their followers and wander
in search of other lands. Some of them finally returned to their native countries,
like Menelaus and Ulysses. Others settled in foreign parts, like Cecrops, Cadmus,
Danaus and Pelops, who settled in Greece (for these heroic contests had arisen
many centuries earlier in Phoenicia, Egypt and Phrygia, since civilization had
begun earlier in those places). Dido must have been one of the latter sort;
222 THE NEW SCIENCE
fleeing from Phoenicia to escape the faction of her brother by whom she was
pursued, she settled in Carthage, which was called Punica as if for Phoenica.
And of the Trojan refugees after the destruction of their city, Capys stopped at
Capua, Aeneas landed in Latium, and Antenor reached Padua.
661 Thus ended the wisdom of the theological poets, the sages or states-
men of the poetic age of the Greeks, such as Orpheus, Amphion, Linus, Musaeus
and others. By singing to the Greek plebs of the force of the gods in the auspices
(which were the praises that such poets must have sung of the gods, that is the
praises of divine providence which it behooved them to sing), they kept the plebs
in subjection to their heroic orders. In like fashion Appius [Claudius], the
grandson of the decemvir, about the 3ooth year of Rome, as we have said else-
where, by singing t,o the Roman plebeians of the force of the gods in the
auspices, of which the nobles claimed to have the science, kept them in obedience
to the nobles. And in the same way Amphion, by singing to his lyre, causes
the stones to move and the walls of Thebes, which Cadmus had founded three
centuries earlier, to arise; that is, he confirms therein the heroic state.
[CHAPTER VII]
COROLLARIES CONCERNING ROMAN ANTIQUITIES, AND IN
PARTICULAR THE SUPPOSEDLY MONARCHIC KINGSHIP AT ROME
AND THE SUPPOSEDLY POPULAR LIBERTY ORDAINED BY
JUNIUS BRUTUS
662 The numerous parallels we have cited in human civil affairs be-
tween the Romans and the Greeks, by which we have repeatedly shown that
ancient Roman history is a perpetual historic mythology of the many various
and diverse fables of the Greeks, must firmly convince anyone of understanding
(which is neither memory nor imagination) that from the times of the kings
until the extension of connubium to the plebs the Roman people (the people of
Mars) was composed of nobles alone. To this people of nobles King Tullus,
beginning with the case of Horatius, granted the right of persons condemned for
crime by the duumvirs or the quaestors to appeal to the entire order. The orders
alone were the heroic peoples, and the plebs were accessions to these peoples
(as later the provinces were accessions to the conquering nations, as Grotius
pointed out) and are in fact the "other people," as Telemachus called his
plebeians in the assembly we mentioned above. And hence, by virtue of an
invincible metaphysical criticism of these founders of nations, we are able to up-
root the error which asserts that such a mass of base-born laborers, held as slaves,
had the right, from the time of Romulus, to elect their kings and have their
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 223
choice ratified by the fathers. This must be an anachronism of later times when
the plebs had a part in the city and shared in the creating of consuls (which
was after the extension of connubium to the plebs by the fathers), dated back
three hundred years to the interregnum of Romulus.
663 Taking the word people in the sense of recent times and applying
it to the earliest times of the world of the cities (because of the inability of
philosophers and philologians alike to imagine such severe aristocracies) has led
to misunderstandings of the words king and liberty as well. As a result, everyone
has believed that the Roman kingdom was monarchic and that the liberty or-
dained by Jumus Brutus was popular. Jean Bodin, however, though he too falls
into the common vulgar error of all preceding political theorists that monarchies
came first, then tyrannies, then popular commonwealths and finally aristocracies
(what distortions of human ideas can be and are made when true principles are
lacking 1 ), nevertheless, observing the effects of an aristocratic commonwealth
in the supposedly popular liberty of ancient Rome, props up his system by dis-
tinguishing the form of a government from its administration and asserting that
that of ancient Rome was popular in form but aristocratically administered. For
all that, since the facts turned out otherwise and even with this prop his political
machinery would not stand, he was finally constrained by the force of the truth
to confess with gross inconsistency that in ancient times the Roman common-
wealth was aristocratic in form as well as in administration.
664 All this is confirmed by Livy, who, in his account of the setting up of
two annual consuls by Junius Brutus, openly states and avows that there was no
change in the form of government. And indeed how could a wise Brutus have
done otherwise than restore the state to its pristine condition from the corruption
into which it had fallen' By the institution of two annual consuls, says Livy [II,
i J, nthtl qtticquam dc rcgia potestate deminutum, "no diminution was made in
the royal power"; for the consuls emerged as two aristocratic annual kings, as in-
deed Cicero in his Laws calls them reges annuos (of the same sort as the kings' for
life at Sparta, which was beyond question an aristocratic commonwealth). And
the consuls, as everyone knows, were subject to recall during their period oi: office
(just as the kings of Sparta were subject to correction by the ephors) and at
the end of their year's reign could be put on trial (as Spartan kings were con-
demned to death by the ephors). This one passage of Livy shows both that the
Roman kingdom was aristocratic and that the liberty ordained by Brutus was
not popular (the freedom of the people from their lords) but aristocratic (the
freedom of the lords from the Tarquin tyrants). Brutus would certainly not
have been able to accomplish this had it not been for the affair of the Roman
Lucretia, which, being offered him, he turned to advantage; for this occasion
was clothed with all the sublime circumstances necessary to arouse the plebs
against the tyrant Tarquinius, who had so badly handled the nobility that
Brutus found it necessary to reconstruct the senate, depleted as it was by the
execution of so many senators by [Tarquinius] Superbus. In doing this he
224 THE NEW SCIENCE
achieved, by prudent consideration, two public advantages: He strengthened
the order of the nobles, which was declining; and he won the favor of the
plebs, for from their body he had to choose many, and perhaps he chose the
boldest, who would otherwise have opposed the reorganization of the nobility.
These he caused to enter the order of the nobility, and thus he composed the
city, the whole of which was at that time divided inter patres et plebem, "be-
tween fathers and plebs."
665 If the precurrencc of so many varied and diverse causes as we have
studied from the age of Saturn onward, if the succession of so many varied and
diverse effects as Bodin observes in the ancient Roman commonwealth, and if
the perpetual and continuous influence of these causes on these effects as set
forth by Livy, are not sufficient to demonstrate that the Roman kingdom was
aristocratic and that the liberty ordained by Brutus was the liberty of the
aristocracy, then we must say that the Romans, a rough and barbarous people,
had a privilege from God withheld from the Greeks, an acute and highly
civilized people, who, according to Thucydides, knew nothing of their own
antiquities down to the Peioponnesian war, the most illustrious time of Greece
as we observed above in the [Notes on the] Chronological Table [101], There
too we showed that the same was true of the Romans down to the second
Carthaginian war, from which Livy professes to write the history of Rome with
more assurance, while yet confessing ignorance of three circumstances, the most
important in the history [of that war], which we also observed there [117].
But, even if we concede such a privilege to the Romans, what survives is still
but an obscure memory, a confused imagination, and so reason cannot reject
the conclusions we have drawn concerning these Roman antiquities.
[CHAPTER VIII]
COROLLARY CONCERNING THE HEROISM OF THE FIRST PEOPLES
666 The study of the heroic age of the early world which we have here
been making leads us perforce to reflect on the heroism of the first peoples. This
heroism, by the axioms which we set forth above [196-197] and which have
their application here, and by the principles herein established for heroic politics,
was a far different thing from what philosophers have hitherto imagined as a
consequence of the matchless wisdom of the ancients, misled by the philologians
with respect to those three undefined words, people, king and liberty, above
referred to. For they have taken the heroic peoples as also including the
plebeians; they have taken the kings as monarchs; and they have taken the
liberty as popular. On the other hand, they have applied to these matters three
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 225
ideas proper to their own refined and learned minds: the first, that of a justice
reasoned on maxims of Socratic morals; the second, that of a glory which is the
fame of benefits done to the human race; and the third, the desire for im-
mortality. By following these errors and applying these ideas, they have believed
that the kings or other great personages of ancient times consecrated them-
selves and their families (as well as their entire patrimonies and substance) to
bring happiness to the poor, who are always the majority in any city or nation.
667 Yet concerning Achilles, the greatest of the Greek heroes, Homer
tells us of three of his qualities which were in complete contrast with the
three ideas of the philosophers. As regards justice, in speaking with Hector, who
proposes that the victor in the fight shall bury the vanquished, he forgets their
equality of rank and the common lot [of men] (two considerations which nat-
urally induce men to recognize justice) and makes the following savage reply:
"When have men ever made pacts with lions? And when were wolves and lambs
ever of one mind?" On the contrary: "If I kill you, I shall drag you naked, bound
to my chariot, three days around the walls of Troy," as indeed he did, "and finally
I shall give your body to my hunting dogs to eat." This too he would have done
if the unhappy father Priam had not himself come to ransom the corpse. And
as for glory, this same Achilles because of a personal grievance (Agamemnon
having wrongfully taken his Briseis from him) considers himself badly treated
by gods and men alike, demands of Jove that he be restored to honor, with-
draws his men from the allied army and his ships from the fleet, and allows Hec-
tor to make a slaughter of the Greeks. Thus in defiance of the devotion that a
man owes his fatherland he insists on avenging a personal offense by the ruin
of his entire nation. Indeed he is not ashamed to rejoice with Patroclus over
Hector's slaughter of the Greeks, and, what is much graver, this man who car-
ries in his heels the fate of Troy expresses the disgraceful wish to Patroclus that
all, Greeks and Trojans alike, may die in the war, leaving only the two of them
alive. And as for the third idea, [the desire of immortality,] when Achilles in
the lower world is asked by Ulysses if he is content there, he answers that he
would rather be the meanest slave in the land of the living. This is the hero that
Homer sings of to the Greek peoples as an example of heroic virtue and to whom
he gives the fixed epithet, blameless! This epithet, if we are to give Homer credit
for making the delight he gives a means of instruction, as poets are supposed to
do, can be understood only as meaning a man so arrogant that, as we would say
nowadays, he will not let a fly pass the end of his nose. What he preaches is thus
the virtue of punctiliousness, on which the duellists of the returned barbarian
times based their entire morality, and which gave rise to the proud laws, the
lofty duties and the vindictive satisfactions of the knights errant of whom the
romancers sing.
668 As against this, let us reflect on the oath of eternal enmity which
Aristotle says the heroes swore against the plebs. Let us reflect further on
Roman history in the time of Roman virtue, which according to Livy was the
226 THE NEW SCIENCE
time of the war against Pyrrhus, a time he acclaims in the phrase nulla aetas
virtutum jeracior, "there was never an age more productive of virtues." Fol-
lowing Sallust as quoted in St. Augustine's City of God, we may extend this pe-
riod from the expulsion of the kings down to the second Carthaginian war.
What of the heroes of this time? Brutus, who consecrates his house in the per-
sons of his two sons to the cause of liberty; Scaevola, who terrifies and routs
the Etruscan king Porsena by plunging his own right hand into the flames for
its failure to kill him; Manlius called the Imperious, who cuts off the head of
his own son for a breach of military discipline though it sprang from love of
glory and valor and issued in victory; men like Curtius, who throws himself,
mounted and armed, into the fatal abyss; like the Decii who, father and son,
sacrifice themselves to save their army; like Fabricius and Curius, who refuse
the Samnite gold and the shares of his kingdom offered them by Pyrrhus; like
Atiiius Regulus, who returns to a certain and most cruel death at Carthage
to preserve the sanctity of the Roman oath what did any of them do for the
poor and unhappy Roman plebs? Assuredly they did but increase their bur-
dens by war, plunge them deeper in the sea of usury, in order to bury them to
a greater depth in the private prisons of the nobles, where they were beaten with
rods on their bare backs like abject slaves. And if anyone in this period of
Roman virtue attempted to relieve the lot of the plebs with some sort of agrarian
or grain law, he was accused of treason and sent to his death. Such was the fate,
to take only one example, of Manlius Capitolinus, though he had saved the
capitol from being burned by the ferocious Senonic Gauls. Likewise in Sparta
(the city of the heroes of Greece, as Rome was the city of the heroes of the world),
the magnanimous king Agis, because of his attempt to relieve the poor Lace-
daemonian plebs, oppressed by the usury of the nobles, by a law wiping out
debts, and to aid them by another giving them testamentary rights, was strangled
by order of the ephors, as before noted. As the valorous Agis was the Manlius
Capitolinus of Sparta, so Manlius Capitolinus was the Agis of Rome, and, on
the simple suspicion of being somewhat mindful of the poor oppressed Roman
plebs, he was thrown from the Tarpeian rock. So that precisely because the
nobles of the first peoples considered themselves heroes and of a nature superior
to that of their plebeians, as has been fully shown above, they were capable of
such misgovernment of the poor masses of the nations. For certainly Roman
history will puzzle any intelligent reader who tries to find in it any evidence of
Roman virtue where there was so much arrogance, or of moderation in the
midst of such avarice, or of justice or mercy where so much inequality and
cruelty prevailed.
669 The only principles that can solve the enigma are of necessity the
following.
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 227
I
670 In consequence of the savage education of the giants which we dis-
cussed above, the [heroic] education of the young was severe, harsh and cruel,
as in the case of the unlettered Lacedaemonians, who were the heroes of Greece.
These people, in order to teach their sons to fear neither pain nor death, would
beat them within an inch of their lives in the temple of Diana, so that they often
fell dead in agonies of pain beneath thir fathers' blows. This cyclopean paternal
authority survived among both Greeks and Romans, permitting them to kill
their innocent new-born babes. Whereas the delight we now take in our young
children reveals all the tenderness of our natures.
II
671 Wives were bought with heroic dowries, a usage which survived as
a solemnity in the nuptials of the Roman priests, which were contracted
coemptione et Jarre, "by mutual [mock] sale and spelt" [-bread offering].
(This was also the custom among the ancient Germans, according to Tacitus,
and we may therefore assume the same of all the earliest barbarous peoples.)
Wives were maintained as a necessity of nature for the procreation of children.
In other respects they were treated as slaves, as is [still] the custom of nations
in many parts of our [old] world and almost everywhere in the new. When the
wife brings the dowry, it purchases the liberty of her husband and is a public
confession on his part of inability to bear the expense of marriage, which is per-
haps the reason for the many privileges with which the emperors favored
dowries.
Ill
672 Children acquired and wives saved for the benefit of their husbands
and fathers. Not, as nowadays, just the contrary.
IV
673 Games and pleasures were strenuous, such as wrestling and racing
(whence the Homeric fixed epithet of Achilles, swift-footed); and often danger-
ous too, such as jousting and hunting wild game, to accustom men to steel them-
selves and to risk and disprize their lives.
v
674 Luxury, refinement and ease were quite unknown.
VI
675 Wars like the ancient heroic ones were all wars of religion, which,
for the reason we have taken as the first principle of this Science, made them
always extremely bitter.
228 THE NEW SCIENCE
VII
676 Heroic enslavement was also prevalent as a consequence of such wars
in which the vanquished were regarded as godless men, so that along with civil
liberty they lost natural liberty as well. Here the axiom above proposed [290]
finds application: namely, that "natural liberty is fiercer in proportion as property
attaches more closely to our persons, and civil servitude is clapped on with goods
of fortune not necessary to life."
[vm]
677 Because of all this the commonwealths were by nature aristocratic,
consisting of those who were naturally strongest. They confined all civil honors
to the few noble fathers. The public good was the family monarchies preserved
by the fatherland; for the true fatherland, as we have often said, meant the
interests of the few fathers, and hence the citizens were naturally patricians.
And with such natures, customs, commonwealths, orders and laws the heroism
of the first peoples is realized. This heroism is now by civil nature impossible,
since the causes of it which we have enumerated have given place to their con-
traries, which have produced the other two kinds of civil states, free popular
commonwealths and monarchies; both of these (though the latter more than the
former) we have shown above to be human. For throughout the whole period
of Roman popular liberty Cato of Utica alone was reputed a hero, and his reputa-
tion was that of a spirit of the aristocratic commonwealth whom Pompey's fall
left as head of the party of the nobility and who, because he could not bear its
humiliation by Caesar, killed himself. In the monarchies the heroes are those
who sacrifice themselves for the glory and grandeur of their sovereigns. Where-
fore we must conclude that such a hero [as devotes himself to justice and the wel-
fare of mankind (666)] is desired by afflicted peoples, conceived by philosophers
and imagined by poets, but is not included among the benefits afforded by civil
nature, as covered by our axiom [260].
678 All we have here set forth concerning the heroism of the first peoples
receives illumination and illustration from the axioms above proposed con-
cerning Roman heroism [278-281 ], which will be found to apply also to the hero-
ism of the ancient Athenians at the time when, as Thucydides [i.e. Isocratcs] re-
lates, they were governed by the stern Areopagites (an aristocratic senate, as
we have seen), and to the heroism of the Spartans, who were a commonwealth
of Heraclids or lords, as a thousand proofs above have demonstrated.
[SECTION VI]
[CHAPTER I]
EPITOMES OF POETIC HISTORY
I
679 This whole divine and heroic history of the theological poets was
only too unhappily described for us in the fable of Cadmus. For first he slays
the great serpent (clears the earth of the great ancient forest). Then he sows
the teeth (a fine metaphor, as noted above, for his ploughing the first fields of
the world with curved pieces of hard wood, which, before the use of iron was
discovered, must have served as the teeth of the first ploughs, and teeth they
continued to be called). He throws a heavy stone (the hard earth which the
clients or famuli wished to plough for themselves, as above explained). From
the furrows armed men spring forth (in the heroic contest over the first agrarian
law aforementioned, the heroes come forth from their estates to assert their
lordship of them, and unite in arms against the plebs, and they fight not among
themselves but with the clients that have revolted against them; the furrows
signifying the orders in which they unite and thereby give form and stability
to the first cities on the basis of arms, as is all set forth above). And Cadmus is
changed into a serpent (signifying the origin of the authority of the aristocratic
senates, for which the ancient Latins would have used the phrase Cadmus
fundus jactus cst, and the Greeks said Cadmus was changed into Draco, the
dragon that wrote the laws in blood). All of which is what we above promised
to make clear: that the fable of Cadmus contained several centuries of poetic
history, and is a grand example of the inarticulateness with which the still in-
fant world labored to express itself, which is one of the seven great sources of
the difficulty of the fables which we shall later enumerate [ist ed., Bk. Ill, Chs.
9-15]. So easy it was for Cadmus to leave a written record of this history in
the vulgar characters which he brought to the Greeks from Phoenicia! And
Desiderius Erasmus, with a thousand absurdities unworthy of the learned man
who was called the Christian Varro, will have it that [the fable] contains the
story of the invention of letters by Cadmus. Thus the illustrious history of such
230 THE NEW SCIENCE
a great benefit to the nations as the invention of letters, which must have made
itself known far and wide, is concealed by Cadmus from the human race in
Greece under the veil of this fable, which remained obscure down to the time
of Erasmus, in order to keep hidden from the vulgar such a great invention of
vulgar wisdom that from the vulgar these letters received the name of vulgar
letters!
II
680 But with admirable brevity and appropriateness Homer tells us the
same history compressed in the hieroglyph of the scepter bestowed on Agamem-
non. Vulcan made it for Jove (as Jove, with the first thunderbolts after the
flood, founded his kingdom over gods and men, which is to say the divine
kingdoms in the state of the families). Then Jove gave it to Mercury (in the
form of the caduceus with which Mercury brought the first agrarian law to
the plebs, whence were born the heroic kingdoms of the first cities). Then
Mercury gave it to Pelops, Pelops to Thyestes, Thyestes to Atreus, and Atreus
to Agamemnon (that is, it came down through the line of inheritance of the
royal house of Argos).
Ill
681 More full and detailed, however, is the history of the world described
by the same Homer as depicted on the shield of Achilles.
682 I. At the beginning there could be seen thereon the sky, the earth,
the sea, the sun, the moon and the stars. This is the epoch of the creation of
the world.
683 II. Thereafter were depicted two cities. In the one there were songs,
hymeneals and nuptials: the epoch of the heroic families composed of children
born of solemn nuptials. In the other there were no such things to be seen; this
represented the epoch of the heroic families with their famuli, who contracted
only natural marriages with none of the solemn rites which surrounded heroic
nuptials. So that these two cities together represented the state of nature, or of
the families. It was to these two cities that Eumaeus, the steward of Ulysses, had
reference when he spoke of the two cities in his fatherland, both ruled by his
father, in which the citizens had all their goods clearly divided (meaning that
no part of citizenship was shared in common between them). Hence the city
without hymeneals is exactly the "other people," as Telemachus in assembly
calls the plebs of Ithaca. And this is Achilles's meaning in complaining of the
outrage done him by Agamemnon, who, he says, has treated him as a common
laborer with no part in the governing.
684 III. Then, in this same city of the nuptials, the shield showed parlia-
ments, laws, trials and punishments. This accords with the answer of the Roman
patricians to the plebs in the heroic contests, asserting that nuptials, property
rights and priesthoods, on which depended the science of laws and hence of
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 231
judgments, were all their special prerogatives since the auspices which consti-
tuted the chief solemnity of nuptials were theirs. For this reason vlri t "men"
(which meant among the Latins the same as heroes among the Greeks), was
the term applied to husbands in solemn matrimony, magistrates, priests and
finally judges, as we have said before. This, then, is the epoch of the heroic cities
which, on the basis of families of the famuli, arose in strictest aristocratic form.
685 IV. The other city is under armed siege and the two cities prey on
each other by turns; hence the city without nuptials (the plebs of the heroic
cities) becomes a separate and hostile city. This affords striking confirmation of
what we have argued above: that the first foreigners, the first hostes, were
the plebs of the heroic peoples, against whom, as we have so often quoted
Aristotle as saying, the heroes swore eternal enmity. Hence the two cities, re-
garding each other as alien, carried on eternal hostilities against each other with
their heroic raids, as we have explained above.
686 V. And lastly there was portrayed on the shield the history of the
arts of humanity, beginning with the epoch of the families. For, first of all,
there appeared the father king, ordering with his scepter that the roasted ox
be divided among the harvesters. Then there were planted vineyards; then
flocks, shepherds and huts; and last of all, dances were depicted. This picture,
beautifully and truly following the order of human things, indicated that first
of all the necessary arts were invented, agriculture with a view first to bread
and then to wine; then the useful arts, such as herding; then the arts of com-
fort, like urban architecture; and lastly those of pleasure, represented by the
dance.
[SECTION VII]
[POETIC PHYSICS]
[CHAPTER I]
POETIC PHYSICS
687 Passing now to the other branch of the main trunk of poetic meta-
physics, along which poetic wisdom branches off into physics and thence into
cosmography and thus into astronomy, whose fruits are chronology and geog-
raphy, we shall begin this remaining part of our discussion with physics.
688 The theological poets considered the physics of the world of nations,
and therefore they first defined Chaos as confusion of human seeds in the period
of the abominable sharing of women. It was thence that the physicists were
later moved to conceive the confusion of the universal seeds of nature, and to
express it they took the word already invented by the poets and hence appropriate.
[The poetic Chaos] was confused because there was no order of humanity
in it, and obscure because it lacked the civil light in virtue of which the heroes
were called incliti, "illustrious." Further they imagined it as Orcus, a misshapen
monster which devoured all things, because men in this infamous community
did not have the proper form of men, and were swallowed up by the void be-
cause through the uncertainty of offspring they left nothing of themselves. This
[chaos] was later taken by the physicists as the prime matter of natural things,
which, formless itself, is greedy for forms and devours all forms. The poets
however gave it also the monstrous form of Pan, the wild god who is the
divinity of all satyrs inhabiting not the cities but the forests; a character to
which they reduced the impious vagabonds wandering through the great forest
of the earth and having the appearance of men but the habits of abominable
beasts. Afterwards, by forced allegories on which we shall comment later, the
philosophers, misled by the name pan, "everything," took him as a symbol for
the formed universe. Scholars have also held that the poets meant first matter
in the fable of Proteus, with whom Ulysses wrestles in Egypt, Proteus in the
water and the hero out of it, unable to get a grip on the monster who keeps
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 233
assuming new forms. But the scholars thus made sublime learning out of what
was doltishness and simplicity on the part of the first men, who (just as children,
looking in a mirror, will try to seize their own reflections) thought from the
various modifications of their own shapes and gestures that there must be a man
in the water, forever changing into different shapes.
689 At length the sky broke forth in thunder, and Jove thus gave a be-
ginning to the world of men by arousing in them the impulse which is proper
to the liberty of the mind, just as from motion, which is proper to bodies as nec-
essary agents, he began the world of nature. For what seems to be impulse in
bodies is but insensible motion, as we said above in the Method. From this im-
pulse came the civil light of which Apollo is the character, by which light was
discerned the civil beauty with which the heroes were beautiful. And Venus was
the character of this civil beauty, which the physicists later interpreted as the
beauty of nature, and even as the whole of formed nature, which is beautifully
adorned with all sensible forms.
690 The world of the theological poets was composed of four sacred ele-
ments: the air whence Jove's bolts came, the water of the perennial springs whose
divinity is Diana, the fire with which Vulcan cleared the forests, and the tilled
earth of Cybele or Berecynthia. All four are elements in divine ceremonies:
auspices, water, fire and spelt. They are watched over by Vesta, who, as we said
before, is the same as Cybele or Berecynthia. She is crowned with the tilled
lands protected by hedges and surmounted by the towers of high-placed towns
(whence the Latin extorns, "exiled," as if externs). This crown encloses all that
was signified by the or bis terrarum, which is properly the world of men. Thence
the physicists were later moved to study the four elements of which the world
of nature is composed.
691 The same theological poets gave living and sensible and for the most
part human forms to the elements and to the countless special natures arising
from them, and thus created many and various divinities, as we have set forth
above in the Metaphysics. This gave Plato opportunity to intrude his doctrine
of minds or intelligences: that Jove was the mind of ether, Vulcan of fire, and
the like. But the theological poets understood so little of these intelligent sub-
stances that down to Homer's time they did not understand the human mind
itself insofar as, by dint of reflection, it opposes the senses. On this there are two
golden passages in the Odyssey in which it is called sacred force or occult vigor,
which mean the same thing.
234 THE NEW SCIENCE
[CHAPTER II]
POETIC PHYSICS CONCERNING MAN, OR HEROIC NATURE
692 But the greatest and most important part of physics is the con-
templation of the nature of man. We have set forth above in the Poetic Economy
how the founders of gentile humanity in a certain sense generated and produced
in themselves the proper human form in its two aspects: that is, how by means
of frightful religions and terrible paternal powers and sacred ablutions they
brought forth from their giant bodies the form of our just corporature, and how
by the discipline of their household economy they brought forth from their
bestial minds the form of our human mind. Here is a proper place for calling
attention again to that development.
693 Now the theological poets in their extremely crude physics saw in
man these two metaphysical ideas: being and subsisting. Certainly the Latin
heroes understood being quite grossly in the sense of eating. This must have
been the first meaning of the verb sum, which later was used in both senses,
just as nowadays when t>ur peasants want to say that a sick man lives they
say he still eats. For sum in the sense of being is extremely abstract, transcending
all particular beings; most pervasive, penetrating all beings; most pure, as not
being circumscribed by any. They apprehended substance, that which stands
beneath and sustains, as residing in the heels because a man stands on the base
of his feet. Hence Achilles carried his fate in his heel, since there stood his fate
or lot of living or dying.
694 The composition of the body they reduced to solids and liquids.
Under the head of solids they included in the first place the viscera or flesh (as
among the Romans visceratio was the term applied to the distribution by the
priests to the people of the flesh of sacrificial victims), so that they used the verb
vcsci for taking nourishment when the food was flesh. Next, bones and joints.
The latter" were called artus from ars t which to the ancient Latins meant the
force of the body, whence artitus, "robust of person"; later ars was applied to
any set of precepts which steadies and directs some faculty of the mind. Then,
the sinews. When the poets were still mute and spoke by physical things, they
took the sinews for forces (from one of these sinews, called fides in the sense of
cord, the force of the gods was called their fides or "faith/' and from this sinew
or cord or force they later fashioned the lute of Orpheus); and indeed they
justly placed their forces in the sinews, for it is the sinews that stretch the
muscles, which is necessary to the exercise of force. And lastly the marrow, in
which with an equal sense of fitness they placed the essence of life (whence
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 235
medulla was a term applied by the lover to the woman he loved, and medullitus
was equivalent to our phrase, "with all one's heart," and great love was said
to consume the marrow). The liquids, on the other hand, they reduced to blood
alone, for the neural or spermatic substance they called also blood (as is shown
by the poetic phrase sanguine cretus for "begotten"); here too with a just sense,
for this substance is the essence of the blood. And again with fine perception
they regarded the blood as the juice of the fibers of which the flesh is composed;
hence the Latin expression succiplenus for fleshy: "steeped in good blood."
695 As for the other part [of our human form], the soul (anima) 9 the
theological poets placed it in the air (which is also called anima by the Latins)
and they thought of it as the vehicle of life. (Hence the propriety of the Latin
phrase anima vivimus and of the poetic locutions Jerri ad vi tales auras, "to be
born"; ducere vitales auras, "to live"; vitam referri in auras , "to die." And in
prose Latin: animam ducere, to live; animam trahcre, to be at the point of
death; animam efflare, emittere, to die.) Whence perhaps the motive of the
physicists for placing the world soul in the air. And the theological poets, again
with a just sense, put the course of life in the course of the blood, on whose proper
flow our life depends.
696 They must with a sense equally just have felt that the spirit (animus}
is the vehicle of sensation, for in good Latin the phrase survived animo sentimus.
And again with a just sense they made spirit (animus) masculine and soul
(anima) feminine, for spirit acts on soul (it is the igneus vigor of which Vergil
speaks); so that spirit must have its subject in the nerves and the neural sub-
stance, and soul must have its in the veins and the blood. Thus the vehicle of the
spirit is the ether and that of the soul is the air, as accords with the relative
swiftness of animal spirits and slowness of vital spirits. And as the soul is the
agent of motion, so the spirit is the agent and therefore the principle of voluntary
action, as the aforesaid igneus vigor of Vergil. The theological poets sensed as
much, but without understanding it, and after Homer they used such expres-
sions as sacred force, occult vigor and unknown god; as the Greeks and Latins,
when in saying or doing anything they sensed a superior principle within them-
selves, would say that some god had willed that thing. Such a principle the Latins
called mens animi, "the mind of the spirit." Thus in a crude fashion they appre-
hended the lofty truth that ideas come to man from God, which later the nat-
ural theology of the metaphysicians proved by invincible reasoning against the
Epicureans who would have it that they spring from the body.
697 They understood generation in such a way that it is difficult to say
whether later scholars have been able to express it more appropriately. The way
in which they understood it is all contained in the word conciperc, for concapcre,
which expresses the natural activity of physical forms (which must now be sup-
plemented by the weight of the air, demonstrated in our times) in taking from
everywhere around them the bodies within their reach, overcoming their re-
sistance, adapting and assimilating them to their own form.
236 THE NEW SCIENCE
698 Decay they expressed very sagaciously in the verb corrumpi, signify-
ing the breaking down of all the parts composing a body, as opposed to sanum
for the sound and healthy condition of all the parts in which life consists. They
must accordingly have thought of disease as bringing on death by corrupting
the solids of the body.
699 They reduced all the internal functions of the spirit to three parts of
the body: the head, the breast and the heart. To the head they assigned all
cognitive functions; as [among them] these were all imaginative, they located
memory (memoria being the Latin term for phantasia or "imagination") in the
head. And in the returned barbarian times fantasia was used for tngegno, and
an ingenious or witty man was called a fantastic man. Cola di Rienzo is so de-
scribed by the author of a contemporary biography in barbarous Italian, a record
of natures and customs like those of the ancient heroes we are discussing, which
is a great evidence of the recurrence of natures and customs in the course the
nations run. Imagination, however, is nothing but the springing up again of
reminiscences, and ingenuity or invention is nothing but the working over of
what is remembered. Now, since the human mind at the time we are con-
sidering had not been refined by any art of writing nor spiritualized by any
practice of reckoning or reasoning, and had not developed its powers of ab-
straction by the many abstract terms in which languages now abound, as we
said above in the Method, it exercised all its force in these three excellent faculties
which came to it from the body. All three appertain to the primary operation of
the mind whose regulating art is topics, just as the regulating art of the second
operation of the mind is criticism; and as the latter is the art of judging, so the
former is the art of inventing, as has been said above in the last Corollaries of
the Poetic Logic. And since naturally the discovery or invention of things comes
before criticism of them, it was fitting that the infancy of the world should con-
cern itself with the first operation of the human mind, for the world then had
need of all inventions for the necessities and utilities of life, all of which had
been provided before the philosophers appeared, as we shall fully show in the
Discovery of the True Homer. With reason, then, did the theological poets call
Memory the mother of the Muses, which, as we found above, were the arts of
humanity.
700 In this connection we must not omit an important observation of
great relevance to the statement in the Method that we can now scarcely under-
stand and cannot at all imagine how the first men thought who founded gentile
humanity. For their minds were so limited to particulars that they regarded
every change of facial expression as a new face, as we observed above in the
fable of Proteus, and for every new passion they imagined a new heart, a new
breast, a new spirit. Hence the poetic plurals, dictated by this nature of human
things rather than by the requirements of counting; or a, vultus, animi, pec tor a,
corda, for example, being employed for their singulars.
701 They made the breast the scat of all the passions, and with a due sense
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 237
of fitness they placed beneath it the two fomenting principles: ( i) the irascible in
the stomach, because there we feel the spreading of the bile expressed from the
surrounding biliary vessels by the intensification of the peristaltic action of the
stomach; and (2) the concupiscible more than anywhere else in the liver, which
is defined as the blood factory. The poets called these organs the praecordia.
The Titan [ Prometheus J implanted therein the passions of the other animals,
taking from each species its ruling passion. In a rough way they understood that
concupiscence is the mother of all the passions, and that the passions have their
dwelling in our humors.
702 The heart they made the seat of all counsel, whence the heroes
agitabant, versabant, volutabant cordc curas; for, being stupid and insensate,
they gave no thought to things to be done except when shaken by passions.
Hence the Latins called wise men cordali and simpletons contrariwise vecordes.
And their resolutions they called sententiac because they judged as they felt,
whence heroic judgments were always true in form though often false in sub-
stance.
[CHAPTER III]
COROLLARY ON HEROIC SENTENCES
703 Now, since the minds of the first men of the gentile world took things
one at a time, being in thu's respect little better than the minds of beasts, for
which each new sensation cancels the preceding (which is the cause of their
being unable to compare and reason discursively), therefore their sentences must
all have been taken as singulars by those who heard them. Hence the sublime
sentence admired by Dionysius Longinus in the ode of Sappho which Catullus
later turned into Latin, in which the lover in the presence of his mistress ex-
presses himself by the simile: llle mi par esse deo videtur, "Like a god he seems
to me,'* yet falls short of the highest degree of sublimity, because the lover does
not make the sentence singular to himself, as Terence does when he says: Vitam
deorum adepti sumus, "We have attained the lite of the gods." This sentiment,
though proper to him who speaks, still has the air of a common sentiment be-
cause of the Latin usage of plural for singular in the first person. However, in
another comedy of the same poet, this sentiment is raised to the highest degree
of sublimity by being made singular and appropriated to him who expresses it:
Dens jactus sum, "I am become a god."
704 On this account abstract sentences are the work of philosophers, be-
cause they contain universals, and reflections on the passions are the work of
false and frigid poets.
238 THE NEW SCIENCE
[CHAPTER IV]
COROLLARY ON HEROIC DESCRIPTIONS
705 Finally they reduced the external functions of the spirit to the five
senses of the body, but senses keen, vivid and strong, for these men were all
robust imagination with very little or no reason. Evidence of this may be found
in the terms they used for the senses.
706 Their word for hearing was audire, as if haurire, for the ears drink
in the air which has been set in motion by other bodies. Seeing distinctly was
called cernere oculis (whence perhaps the Italian scernere)^ for the eyes are like
a sieve and the pupils like two holes, and as from the sieve streams of dust
pour down to touch the earth, so from the eyes, through the pupils, stream
forth rays of light to touch the objects which are distinctly seen. (This is the
visual ray of which the Stoics later treated, and which in our day has been
happily demonstrated by Descartes.) The general expression for seeing was
usurpare oculis, as if things seen were actually taken possession of by sight,
Tangere, "to touch," meant also "to steal,'* for to touch a body is to take some-
thing away from it, as our more intelligent physicists are just beginning to
understand. Smelling they called oljacere, as if by smelling odors they created
them; as indeed later the natural philosophers, with their grave observations,
found it to be true that the senses make the qualities that are called sensible.
And lastly they called tasting sapere, a word which properly applies to the
things which have savor, because they assayed things for the savor proper to
them. Hence later, by a fine metaphor, they used the term sapientia, "wisdom,"
for the faculty of making those uses of things which they have in nature, not
those which opinion supposes them to have.
707 Herein is divine providence to be admired, because, having given us
the senses for the guarding of our bodies, at a time when men had fallen into
the state of brutes (in whom the senses are keener than in men), providence saw
to it that by their brutish nature itself they should have the keenest senses for
their self-preservation. Later, when they entered the age of reflection, by which
they could take counsel for the protection of their bodies, the senses were per-
mitted to become less sharp. Because of all this, the heroic descriptions, as we
have them in Homer, are so luminously and splendidly clear that all later poets
have been unable to imitate them, to say nothing of equaling them.
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 239
[CHAPTER V]
COROLLARY ON HEROIC CUSTOMS
708 By such heroic natures, furnished with such heroic senses, customs of
like kind were formed and fixed. Because of their recent gigantic origin, the
heroes were in the highest degree awkward and wild, such as we have found
the Patagonians described, very limited in understanding but endowed with
the vastest imaginations and the most violent passions. Hence they must have
been boorish, crude, harsh, wild, proud, difficult and obstinate in their resolves,
and at the same time easily diverted when confronted with new and contrary
objects; even as we daily observe in our stubborn peasants, who yield to every
reasonable argument that is put to them, but, because their powers of reflection
are weak, as soon as the argument which has moved them has left their minds,
return at once to their original purpose. From this same lack of reflective
capacity, the heroes were bluff, touchy, magnanimous and generous, as Homer
portrays Achilles, the greatest of all the Greek heroes. It was with such examples
of heroic customs in mind that Aristotle made it a precept of the art of poetry
that the heroes who are taken as protagonists in tragedies should be neither very
good nor very bad but should exhibit a mixture of great vices and great virtues.
For that heroism of virtue which realizes its highest idea belongs to philosophy
and not to poetry; and gallant heroism is a creation of post-Homeric poets who
either made up fables of a new cast or took the old fables, originally grave and
severe as becoming the founders of nations, and altered and finally corrupted
them to suit the growing effeminacy of later times. We have a great proof of
this and it may well serve as a leading canon of the historical mythology we
are discussing in the example of Achilles. On account of Bnseis, taken from
him by Agamemnon, he makes such an outcry as to fill heaven and earth and
provide matter for the whole Iliad, yet nowhere in that entire epic does he give
the faintest indication of amorous passion at being deprived of the girl. Similarly
Menelaus, though on Helen's account he stirs all Greece to war against Troy,
does not show, throughout that whole long and great war, the slightest sign of
amorous distress or jealousy of Paris, who has robbed him of her and is enjoying
her.
709 All that we have remarked in these three corollaries on heroic sen-
tences, descriptions and customs, belongs properly to the discovery of the true
Homer which we shall take up in the following book.
[SECTION VIII]
[CHAPTER I]
POETIC COSMOGRAPHY
710 As the theological poets had set up as principles in physics the sub-
stances they imagined to be divine, so they described a cosmography in accord
with this physics, regarding the world as composed of gods of the sky, of the
underworld (called by the Latins respectively dti supen and dti inferi), and of
gods intermediate between earth and sky (who must have been those whom the
Latins at first called medioxumt}.
711 The first object of their contemplation in the world was the sky, and
heavenly things must have been for the Greeks the first mathcmata or sublime
things and the first thcorcmata or divine objects of contemplation. The contem-
plation of such things was so called by the Latins from the regions of the sky
marked off by the augurs for the taking of auspices, which regions they called
templa coeli; whence in the East the name of the Zoroastrians, which Bochart
takes to mean "those who contemplate the stars/' for purposes of divination from
the paths of falling stars at night.
712 For the poets the first sky was no higher than the summits of the
mountains, where the giants were halted in their feral wanderings by Jove's
first thunderbolts. This is the Heaven that reigned on earth and, from this be-
ginning, conferred great benefits on mankind, as we have fully explained above.
Hence they must have imagined the sky to be the mountain tops (from whose
sharpness the Latins applied the term coelum also to the burin, a tool used in
stone or metal engraving), just as children imagine that mountains are the
columns that hold up the roof of the sky (a principle of cosmography found in
the Koran of the Arabs). Two of these columns continued to be called the
Pillars of Hercules, as we shall see farther on; the original meaning of columen,
as applied to them, must have been prop or stay; rounded columns were
introduced later by architecture. It was from such a roof on Olympus, as Thetis
tells Achilles in Homer, that Jove went with the other gods to feast on [Mt.]
Atlas. Evidently, as we said above in speaking of the giants, the fable of the
Titans warring with the gods and piling up lofty mountains, Ossa on Pelion
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 241
and Olympus on Ossa, in order to climb up to heaven and cast out the gods, must
have been made up after Homer's time, for certainly in the Iliad he always
speaks of the gods as residing on the summit of Olympus, so that the collapse
of Olympus alone would have sufficed to cause their downfall. Nor does this
fable really fit in the Odyssey, where it is found. For in that poem the lower
world in which Ulysses sees and speaks with the departed heroes is no deeper
than a ditch; and since the Homer of the Odyssey had such a limited notion of
the lower world, his idea of heaven must have been equally simple, in con-
formity with that of the Homer of the Iliad. Consequently the fable is not
Homer's, as we promised above to demonstrate.
713 It was in this heaven that the gods first reigned on earth and had
dealings with the heroes, according to the order of the natural theogony above
set forth, beginning with Jove. In this heaven justice was dealt out on earth by
Astraea, crowned with ears of grain and holding a balance; for the first human
justice was administered by the heroes to men in the first agrarian law above
mentioned; and men first became aware of weight, then of measure, and only
very slowly of number, in which reason finally came to rest; so that Pythagoras
put the essence of the human soul in numbers because he knew of nothing more
abstracted from bodies. Through this heaven the heroes go galloping on horse-
back, like Bellerophon on Pegasus; and vohtare equo was Latin for going about
on horseback. It is in this heaven that Juno whitens the milky way with milk,
not her own, for she was sterile, but with the milk of the mothers of the families,
who suckled the legitimate offspring of the heroic nuptials of which Juno was
the divinity. Over this heaven the gods are carried in carts of the poetic gold or
grain after which the golden age was named. In this heaven wings were used,
not for flight nor even to signify quickness of wit, but to signify heroic institu-
tions, which were all based on the law of the auspices, as we have fully shown
above. Of this sort are the wings of Hymen (heroic Love), Astraea, the Muses,
Pegasus, Saturn, Fame, Mercury (who bears them on his heels and at his temples,
and whose caduceus is likewise winged, for with it he brought down from this
heaven the first agrarian law to the rebellious plebs in the valleys, as above
noted), and also the dragon (for the Gorgon also has winged temples, and
clearly its wings stand neither for wit nor for flight). It is in this heaven that
Prometheus steals fire from the sun, the fire that the heroes must have kindled
with flints and set to the thorny underbrush on the mountain tops, dried out by
the hot suns of summer; whence, as we are faithfully told, the torch of Hymen
was made of thorns. From this heaven Vulcan is precipitated by a kick of Jove;
from this heaven Phaethon falls headlong in the chariot of the Sun; and from
this heaven the apple of discord drops all fables that we have explained above.
And finally, it is from this heaven that the ancilia or sacred shields of the Romans
must have fallen.
714 The first of the deities of the lower world imagined by the the-
ological poets was that of water, and the first water was that of the perennial
242 THE NEW SCIENCE
springs, which they called Styx and by which the gods swore, as noted above;
on which account, perhaps, Plato supposed that the abyss of waters was in the
center of the earth. Homer, however, in the contest of the gods, makes Pluto
fear that Neptune may open the earth with an earthquake and expose the lower
world to the eyes of men and gods. And i we assumed that the abyss was in
the deepest entrails of the earth, the earthquakes of Neptune would have quite
the contrary effect, for the lower world would be submerged and completely
covered with water. So, as we engaged above to do, we have shown that the
allegory of Plato is ill-suited to the fable. In view of what we have said, the
first lower world must not have been any deeper than the source of the springs.
Its first deity was Diana, of whom poetic history says that she was a triformed
goddess, for in the heavens she was Diana, on earth the huntress Cynthia and
companion to her brother Apollo, and in the underworld Proserpine.
715 With the practice of burial the idea of the underworld was extended,
and the poets called the grave the underworld (an expression also found in Holy
Scripture). Thus the lower world was no deeper than a ditch, like that in which
Ulysses, according to Homer, sees the underworld and the souls of the dead
heroes; for in this lower world were placed the Elysian fields, wherein, by vir-
tue of burial, the souls of the dead enjoy eternal peace; and the Elysian fields
are the happy dwelling place of the Manes or benevolent spirits of the dead.
716 Later the uftderworld had the depth of a furrow. It is to this under-
world that Ceres (the same as Proserpine, the seed of the grain) is carried off by
the god Pluto, to remain there six months and then return to behold the light
of heaven. By this will be explained later the golden bough with which Aeneas
descends into the lower world; which was Vergil's continuation of the heroic
metaphor of the golden apple, which we have already found to be the ears of
grain.
717 Finally the underworld was taken to be the plains and the valleys (as
opposed to the lofty heaven set on the mountain tops) where the scattered
vagrants remained in their infamous promiscuity. The god of this underworld
is Erebus, called the son of Chaos, that is of the confusion of human seeds. He
is the father of civil night (in which names are obscured), even as the heaven
is illuminated by the civil light with which the heroes are resplendent. Through
this underworld runs the river Lethe, the stream of oblivion, for these men
left no name of themselves to their posterity, whereas the glory of heaven
eternalizes the names of the illustrious heroes. From this underworld Mercury
with his rod bearing the agrarian law, as we said above in our account of his
[poetic] character, recalls the souls from Orcus the all-devouring monster. This
is the civil history preserved for us by Vergil in the phrase: hac ille animus evocat
Oreo. That is, he redeems the lives of bestial and lawless men from the feral
state which swallows up all mankind in that they leave nothing of themselves
to their posterity. The rod was later used by the mages in the vain belief that it
had power to bring back the dead. The Roman praetor struck slaves on the
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 243
shoulder with his staff in token of their liberation, as if therewith bringing them
back from death to life. Sorcerers also used in their witchcraft the rod which
the wise mages of Persia had used for the divination of the auspices. Where-
fore divinity was attributed to the rod, and it was held by the nations to be
divine and capable of performing miracles, as Trogus Pompeius assures us in
Justin's abridgment of his work.
718 This is the underworld guarded by Cerberus, the doglike impudence
of copulating shamelessly in public. Cerberus is three-throated, that is, he has
an enormous gullet (the three is superlative, as noted several times above), be-
cause like Orcus he devours everything; and when he comes up on the earth
the sun goes backwards (for when he enters the heroic cities the civil light of
the heroes turns again to civil night).
719 At the bottom of this underworld flows the river Tartarus, and there
the damned are tormented: Ixion forever turns his wheel, Sisyphus rolls his
stone, and Tantalus is forever dying of hunger and thirst all fables explained
above. And the river that causes the torment of thirst is the same river "without
contentment" which is signified by both Acheron and Phlegethon. Into this
underworld Tityus and Prometheus were later cast by the ignorance of the
mythoiogers; but actually it was in heaven that they were chained to the crags,
to have their entrails devoured by the mountain eagle (the grievous supersti-
tion of the auspices, as above explained).
720 The philosophers later found all these fables convenient for the
meditation and exposition of their moral and metaphysical doctrines. Plato was
stimulated by them to understand the three divine punishments which only the
gods can inflict, and not men: namely, oblivion, infamy and the remorse of a
guilty conscience; and to understand that it is by the via purgativa or purga-
torial journey of the passions of the spirit which torment mankind (so he inter-
prets the lower world of the theological poets) that one enters upon the via
unitiva by which the human mind attains union with God by means of con-
templation of eternal divine things (which he takes the theological poets to
have meant by their Elysian fields).
721 But the theological poets had invented their fables with political mat-
ters in mind, as they as founders of nations naturally could not help doing, and
all the gentile founders of peoples descended into the lower world with ideas
quite different from these moral and metaphysical [ideas of Plato], Orpheus,
who founded the Greek nation, made the descent; and, disobeying the injunc-
tion not to turn his head on leaving, he lost his wife Eurydice (signifying his
return to the infamous sharing of women). Hercules (and every nation tells
of one as its founder) also descended, for the purpose of liberating Theseus, the
founder of Athens, who had descended to bring back Proserpine (that is, since
as we have said she is the same as Ceres, to bring back the sown seed in the form
of ripened grain). But later Vergil, with his profound knowledge of heroic
antiquities (singing of the political hero in the first six books of his Aeneid and
244 TO E NEW SCIENCE
of the military hero in the last six), gives us an account of the descent of Aeneas
more detailed than any of the others. Aeneas has the advice and safe-conduct
of the Cumaean Sybil (that is, since every gentile nation had a sybil and twelve
have come down to us by name, his descent was made by divination, which was
the vulgar wisdom of the gentiles). With the piety of a bloody religion (the
piety professed by the ancient heroes in the fierceness and ruthlessness of their
recent bestial origin, as we have shown above) he sacrifices his sodus Misenus
(by the cruel right which the heroes had over their first socii, as we have set
forth above). He then enters the ancient forest (such as covered the land every-
where while it was yet uncultivated), throws the soporific sop to Cerberus and
puts him to sleep (just as Orpheus had overcome him with the sound of his
lyre, which we have previously seen by abundant evidence to signify law; and
just as Hercules had tied him up with the knot with which he had bound
Antaeus in Greece, that is with the first agrarian law, in accordance with what
we have said above). (Because of his insatiable hunger, Cerberus was imagined
as three-throated, that is, as having an enormous gullet, the three standing for the
superlative as before noted.) Thus Aeneas descends into the underworld (which
we found was at first no deeper than a furrow), comes before Dis (the god of
heroic riches, poetic gold or grain, being identical with Pluto the abductor of
Proserpine or Ceres, the goddess of grain), and presents the golden bough. (Here
the great poet takes the metaphor of the golden apple, signifying the ears of
grain, and extends it to the golden bough, signifying the harvest.) When the
golden bough is torn from its trunk another grows in its place (because there can
be no second harvest until a year after the first has been gathered). And when
the gods are well disposed, the bough readily and easily comes off in the hand
of him who seizes it, but otherwise no strength in the world is sufficient to
pluck it. (For the grain grows up naturally where God wills it, but where he
does not will it no human industry can hope to make it grow.) Aeneas then
proceeds through the underworld to the Elysian fields (for the heroes, having
settled in the cultivated fields, enjoyed eternal peace in death if they had proper
burial, as we have set forth above). Here he beholds his ancestors and those who
are to come after him (for on the religion of burial, called the underworld by
the poets as already noted, were founded the first genealogies, from which, as
we have also remarked above, history took its beginning).
722 The earth was associated by the theological poets with the guarding
of the boundaries, and hence it was called terra. This heroic origin the Latins
preserved in the word territorium, which signifies the district within which
the imperium is exercised. The Latin grammarians erroneously derived ter~
ritorium from the terror of the fasces used by the lictors to disperse the crowds
and make way for the Roman magistrates. But at the time when the word ter-
ritorium arose there were no great crowds in Rome, for, according to Varro as
before cited, in two hundred and fifty years of rule she had subdued more than
twenty peoples without extending her imperium more than twenty miles. In-
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 245
stead the word originated in the fact that the boundaries of the cultivated fields,
within which the civil powers later arose, were guarded by Vesta with bloody
rites, as we have seen above when we noted that the Latin Vesta was the same
as the Greek Cybele or Berecynthia, who wears a crown of towers, that is of
strongly situated lands. From this crown the so-called or bis terrarum began to
take form, signifying the world of the nations, later amplified by the cosmog-
raphers and called orbis mundanus or, in a word, mundus, the world of nature.
723 The poetic world was divided into three kingdoms or regions: that
of Jove in heaven, that of Saturn on earth, and the underworld kingdom of
Pluto, called Dis, god of heroic riches, the first gold or grain, since tilled fields
make the true wealth of peoples.
724 Thus the world of the theological poets was formed of four civil
elements, later taken by the physicists as natural elements, as we have said not
far above: namely, the element of Jove, the air; that of Vulcan, fire; that of
Cybele, earth; and that of the underworld Diana, water. For Neptune was late
in coming into the acquaintance of the poets, because, as we have said above,
the nations were slow in coming down to the seacoasts. Any sea extending be-
yond the horizon was called Ocean, and any land it surrounded an island, as
Homer speaks of the island of Aeolia as surrounded by the Ocean. From such
an Ocean must have come the horses of Rhesus, which were made pregnant by
Zephyr, the west wind of Greece as we shall shortly show; and on the shores of
the same Ocean the horses of Achilles, also begotten by Zephyr, must have been
born. Later the geographers, observing that the whole earth, like a great island,
was girt by the sea, called Ocean all the waters by which the land is surrounded.
725 Finally, beginning with the idea by which every slight slope was
called mundus (whence the phrases in mundo est, in proclwi cst, for "it is easy";
and later everything for the embellishment of a woman came to be called mundus
muliebris), when they came to understand that the earth and the sky were
spherical in form, and that from every point of the circumference there is a
slope towards every other, and that the ocean bathes the land on every shore,
and that the whole of things is adorned with countless varied and diverse
sensible forms, the poets called this universe mundus as being that with which,
by a fine metaphor, nature adorns herself.
[SECTION IX]
[POETIC ASTRONOMY]
[CHAPTER I]
POETIC ASTRONOMY
726 This world system, somewhat further developed, lasted down to the
time of Homer, who always speaks of the gods as settled on Mt. Olympus. We
have noted that he has Thetis, the mother of Achilles, tell him that the gods had
gone from Olympus to feast on [Mt.] Atlas. So that in Homer's time the highest
mountains on the earth were evidently regarded as pillars sustaining the heavens,
even as Abyla and Calpe on the straits of Gibraltar continued to be called the
Pillars of Hercules because the hero had taken up the burden of Adas, who had
grown tired of supporting the heavens on his shoulders.
[CHAPTER II]
ASTRONOMICAL AND PHYSICO-PHILOLOGICAL DEMONSTRATION OF
THE UNIFORMITY OF THE PRINCIPLES [OF ASTRONOMY] AMONG
ALL ANCIENT GENTILE NATIONS
727 But as the indefinite force of human minds went on developing, and
as the contemplation of the heavens required for taking the auspices obliged
the peoples to study the heavens continually, in the minds of the nations the
heavens rose ever higher, and with them rose likewise the gods and the heroes.
And here for the ascertainment of poetic astronomy it may help us to make use
of three items of philological erudition. The first states that astronomy was
brought into the world by the Chaldean people; the second, that the Phoenicians
carried from $he Chaldeans to the Egyptians the use of the quadrant and the
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 247
knowledge of the elevation of the pole; and the third, that the Phoenicians, who
must have been instructed by the Chaldeans, brought astral theology to the
Greeks. To these three bits of philological erudition we may add these two
philosophical truths: first, the civil truth that nations, if not emancipated in
the extreme of religious liberty (which only comes in the final stages of deca-
dence), are naturally wary of accepting foreign deities; and second, the physi-
cal truth that, by an ocular illusion, the planets seem to us larger than the fixed
stars.
728 Having premised these principles, we may now say that among all
the gentile nations of the East, of Egypt, and of Greece (and we shall see that it
holds for Latium too), astronomy sprang from uniform vulgar origins, for by a
uniform allocation the gods were raised to the planets and the heroes were as-
signed to the constellations, because the planets appear much larger than the
fixed stars. Hence the Phoenicians found among the Greeks that the gods were
already prepared to revolve with the planets and the heroes to compose the con-
stellations, even as later the Greeks found the same to be true among the Latins.
And from these examples it is safe to say that the Phoenicians found the same
readiness among the Egyptians as among the Greeks. In this way the heroes
and the hierogiylphs signifying their institutions or their coats-of-arms, and a
goodly number of the major gods, were raised to the heavens and put in readiness
for learned astronomy to give to the hitherto nameless heavenly bodies to their
matter, as it were the form of stars or constellations on the one hand, or of
wandering planets on the other.
729 Thus, beginning with vulgar astronomy, the first peoples wrote in
the skies the history of their gods and their heroes. Thence there remained this
eternal property, that the memories of men full of divinity or of heroism are
matter worthy of history, in the one case because of works of genius and of eso-
teric wisdom, in the other because of works of valor and of vulgar wisdom.
And poetic history gave the learned astronomers occasions for depicting the
heroes and the heroic hieroglyphs in the sky with one group of stars rather than
another, and in one part of the sky rather than another, and for placing in one
planet rather than another the major gods by whose names the planets have since
been called.
730 To speak somewhat more at length of the planets than of the con-
stellations: Certainly Diana, goddess of the chastity preserved in nuptial rela-
tions, who lies all quiet in the night with the sleeping Endymion, was attached to
the moon, the giver of nocturnal light. Venus, goddess of civil beauty, was at-
tached to the gayest and brightest of all the planets. Mercury, the divine herald,
clothed in civil light, with all the wings (aristocratic hieroglyphs) with which
he is adorned (as he bears the agrarian law to the mutinous clients), is lodged in a
planet which is so obscured by the rays of the sun as to be rarely visible. Apollo,
god of that same civil light (which gave the epithet incliti to the heroes), is
placed in the sun, the source of natural light. Bloody Mars dwells in a star of the
248 THE NEW SCIENCE
like hue. Jove, king and father of men and gods, is placed above all the rest, but
beneath Saturn, who, since he is the father both of Jove and of Time, has a
longer annual course than all the other planets. His wings ill become him if, by
a forced allegory, they are taken to mean the swiftness of time, for he runs his
year more slowly than any other planet; but he took them to heaven along
with his scythe, the latter signifying the reaping not of men's lives but of grain,
by the harvests of which the heroes counted the years, and the wings signifying
that the cultivated fields were the property of the heroes. Finally the planets
or wanderers, with the chariots of gold (that is of grain) with which they went
about in heaven when it was on earth, now revolve in their appointed orbits.
731 In view of all that has here been set forth, it must be affirmed that the
predominating influences which the stars and planets are supposed to have over
sublunar bodies, have been attributed to them from those which the gods and
heroes exercised when they were on earth. So little do they depend on natural
causes!
[SECTION X]
[POETIC CHRONOLOGY]
[CHAPTER I]
POETIC CHRONOLOGY
732 The theological poets gave beginnings to chronology in conformity
with their astronomy. For that same Saturn, who was so called by the Latins
from salt, "sown" [fields], and who was called Chronos or Time by the Greeks,
gives us to understand that the first nations (all composed of farmers) began
to count their years by their harvests of grain (the sole or at least the chief thing
for which the peasants labored all year). And since they were at first mute, they
must have held as many ears or straws and made as many reaping motions as the
number of years they meant to signify. Thus in Vergil (as learned as ever man
was in heroic antiquities) we find two expressions [407]: the first infelicitous
and, by supreme imitative art, infehcitously contorted, to express the infelicity
of the first ages in expressing themselves: Post aliquot mca rcgna videns mirabor
aristas, meaning simply post aliquot annos. The second has somewhat more
clarity: Tcrtia messis erat. And indeed even nowadays the peasants of Tuscany,
the nation most highly regarded for its speech in all Italy, instead of saying
"three years," for example, say "we have harvested three times." The Romans
preserved this heroic history of the poetic year signified by the harvest, in using
the name annona for the management of the stores, particularly of grain,
733 Accordingly Hercules has come down to us as the founder of the
Olympiads, the celebrated time-divisions of the Greeks (from whom we get all
we know of gentile antiquities), for it was he who set fire to the forests in order
to prepare for sowing the lands whereon were gathered the harvests by which
the years were reckoned. The games must have been instituted by the Nemeans
in celebration of the hero's victory over the Nemean fire-breathing lion, which
we have interpreted above as the great forest of the earth, to which, apprehended
under the idea of a very powerful animal, they gave the name lion, because so
much labor was required to tame it. Later the name was applied to the most
250 THE NEW SCIENCE
powerful of animals, as set forth above in the Origins of Family Coats-of-Arms
[540], and the astronomers assigned to the Lion a house in the zodiac, next
to that of Astraea, crowned with ears of grain. This is why in the circuses
images of lions were often shown, and images of the sun; it is also the reason for
the metae with eggs on top, which must originally have been mctac of grain
and the clearings or deforested eyes of the giants, as set forth above. The
astronomers later took the egg as signifying the ellipse described by the sun in
its annual path through the ecliptic; a meaning that Manetho might more
fittingly have given to the egg which Knef holds in his mouth, instead of
interpreting it as signifying the generation of the universe.
734 The natural theogony above set forth enables us to determine the
successive epochs of the age of the gods, which correspond to certain first
necessities or utilities of the human race, which everywhere had its beginnings
in religion. The age of the gods must have lasted at least nine hundred years
from the appearance of the various Joves among the gentile nations, which is to
say from the time when the heavens began to thunder after the universal flood.
And the twelve major gods, beginning with Jove, successively imagined within
this age, serve to divide it into twelve smaller epochs and thus give some certainty
to the chronology of poetic history. By way of example, Deucalion, whom
fabulous history places immediately after the flood and the giants, and who
with his wife Pyrrha founds the families by means of matrimony, is born of
Greek imaginations in the epoch of Juno, goddess of solemn nuptials. Hellen,
who founds the Greek language and, through his three sons, divides it into three
dialects, is born in the epoch of Apollo, god of song, in whose time poetic
speech in verse must have begun. Hercules, who performs the great labor of
slaying the Hydra or the Nemean lion (reducing the land to fields for sowing),
and who brings back from Hesperia the golden apples (that is, the harvests, an
enterprise worthy of history; not pomegranates, an errand for a parasite), dis-
tinguished himself in the epoch of Saturn, god of the sown fields. Likewise
Perseus must have achieved his fame in the epoch of Minerva when the civil
powers were already in existence, since his shield bears the head of Medusa, as
does that of Minerva. And finally, Orpheus must have been born after the epoch
of Mercury, for by singing to the Greek beasts the force of the gods in the aus-
pices, the science of which belonged to the heroes, he reestablished the heroic na-
tions of Greece and gave the heroic age its name, for in that age these heroic con-
tests took place. Hence at the same time with Orpheus there flourish such other
heroic poets as Linus, Amphion and Musaeus. Amphion uses stones (in the
sense in which the Latin word for stone, lapis, meant a lout, and signifying
therefore the simple-minded plebeians) to erect the walls of Thebes three hun-
dred years after its founding by Cadmus; exactly as, three hundred years after
the founding of Rome, Appius, the grandson of the decemvir, as before noted,
by singing to the Roman plebs which agitabat connubia more jerarum (prac-
ticed marriages like those of the beasts of Orpheus) of the force of the gods in
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 251
the auspices (the science of which belonged to the nobles) reduces them to
obedience and establishes the heroic Roman state.
735 Furthermore we must here take note of four kinds of anachronisms
coming under the familiar general head of placing times too early or too late.
The first is that of times [for our knowledge] empty of facts which must really
have been full of them. Thus the age of the gods, in which we have found almost
all the origins of civil human affairs, passes with the learned Varro for the "ob-
scure time." The second is that of times full of facts which must have been
empty of them. Thus, under the false belief that the fables were invented by the
heroic poets, especially by Homer, the age of the heroes, which runs for two
hundred years, is filled with all the facts belonging to the age of the gods, and
these facts should be put back into the age to which they belong. The third is
that of uniting times which should be divided, lest, for example, Greece should
seem to have passed from a state of wild beasts to the splendor of the Trojan
war within the single life-span of Orpheus, which is the chronological mon-
strosity to which we called attention in the Notes on the Chronological Table.
The fourth and last is that of dividing times which should be united. By such
an anachronism the Greek colonies are brought into Sicily and Italy more than
three hundred years after the wanderings of the heroes, whereas they were
brought there in the course and as the result of the wanderings of these same
heroes.
[CHAPTER II]
CHRONOLOGICAL CANON FOR DETERMINING THE BEGINNINGS OF
UNIVERSAL HISTORY, WHICH MUST PRECEDE THE MONARCHY
OF NINUS, WITH WHICH IT [ COMMONLY] STARTS
736 In virtue of the aforesaid natural theogony which has given us our
rational poetic chronology, and taking into consideration the kinds of anachro-
nisms noted in poetic history, now, in order to determine the beginnings of uni-
versal history, which must precede the monarchy of Ninus from which it [com-
monly] takes its start, we set up this chronological canon: that from the dis-
persion of fallen mankind through the great forest of the earth, beginning in
Mesopotamia (according to our reasonable postulate in the Axioms [298, 301]),
a span of only a hundred years of feral wandering was consumed by the im-
pious [part of the] race of Shem in East Asia, and one of two hundred years by
the other two races of Ham and Japheth in the rest of the world. At the end of
that time, under the religion of Jove (and the many Joves scattered through the
first gentile nations gave us evidence above that the flood was universal), the
252 THE NEW SCIENCE
princes of the nations began to settle down, each in the land where fortune had
placed him. Then ensued the nine hundred years of the age of the gods. Towards
the end of that age the nations (which had all been founded inland because they
had been dispersed through the world in search of food and [fresh] water, which
are not found on the seaboard) must have come down to the coasts. Hence
there arose in the minds of the Greeks the idea of Neptune, whom we found to
be the last of the twelve major divinities. In like fashion, among the Latins, nine
hundred years elapsed between the age of Saturn, the golden age of Latium, and
the descent of Ancus Marcius to the coast to take Ostia. After this came the two
hundred years which the Greeks assign to the heroic age, beginning with the
raids of King Minos, continuing with Jason's naval expedition to Pontus and
later with the Trojan war, and ending with the wanderings of the heroes and
the return of Ulysses to Ithaca. Thus Tyre, capital of Phoenicia, must have been
brought from inland to the shore, and thence to an island near by in the
Phoenician sea, more than a thousand years after the flood. And inasmuch as
before the Greek heroic age Tyre was already a famous city both for navigation
and for its colonies scattered through the Mediterranean and even on the
Ocean, it is clearly proved that the beginning of the entire human race was in the
East, and that first the feral wanderings through the inland parts of the world,
then the heroic law by land and sea, and finally the maritime traffic of the
Phoenicians scattered the first nations through the remaining parts of the world.
These principles of the commigration of the peoples (as we set forth in an
axiom [299]) seem more reasonable than those imagined by Wolfgang Latius.
737 Now, in virtue of the uniform course run by all the nations, which
has been proved above by the uniformity of the gods raised to the stars, as
brought by the Phoenicians to Egypt and Greece from the East, we must infer
that the reign of the Chaldeans in the East covered a like period of time
[noo years], from Zoroaster to Ninus, who founded there the first monarchy
in the world, that of Assyria; and correspondingly [in Egypt] from Hermes
Trismegistus to Sesostris, the Ramses of Tacitus, who also founded there a great
monarchy. And since these were both inland nations, they must have passed
through the successive stages of divine and heroic regimes and then of popular
liberty in order to reach that of monarchy, which is the last form of human
government, if the Egyptian division of the three ages of the world that had
elapsed before them is to stand. For, as we shall show later, monarchy cannot
arise save as a result of the unchecked liberty of the peoples, to which the opti-
mates subject their power in the course of civil wars. When this authority is
thus divided into minimal parts among the peoples, the whole of it is easily
taken over by those who, coming forward as partisans of popular liberty, emerge
finally as monarchs. Phoenicia, however, as a maritime nation enriched by its
commerce, remained in the stage of popular liberty, which is the first form of
human government.
738 Thus purely by understanding, without benefit of memory, which
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 253
has nothing to go on where facts are not supplied by the senses, we seem to
have filled in the beginnings of universal history both in ancient Egypt and
in the East, which is more ancient than Egypt; and further, within the East, the
beginnings of the Assyrian monarchy. For hitherto this monarchy, for lack of
its many and varied antecedent causes, which must have been previously at
work in order to produce a monarchy, which is the last of the three forms of
civil government, has appeared in history as a sudden birth, as a frog is born
of a summer shower.
739 In this way chronology has certainty lent to its successive periods by
the progress of customs and deeds through which the human race must have
marched. For, by an axiom above stated [314], chronology has here begun
her doctrine where her subject matter began: that is, with Chronos or Saturn
(after whom time was called chronos among the Greeks), the reckoner of the
years by the harvests; with Urania, watcher of the skies for the purpose of taking
the auspices; and with Zoroaster, contemplator of the stars in order to give his
oracles from the paths of falling stars. (For such were the first mathemata and
the first thcorcmata, the first sublime or divine things contemplated and observed
by the nations, as we have said above.) Later, when Saturn ascended to the
seventh sphere, Urania became the contemplator of the stars and planets, and
the Chaldaeans, with the advantage of their immense open plains, became
astronomers and astrologers, measuring the movements and observing the
aspects of the heavenly bodies and imagining their influences on so-called sub-
lunar bodies, and even, though vainly, on the free wills of men. This science
preserved the first names that had been given to it in full propriety: astronomy,
the science of the laws of the stars, and astrology, the science of the speech of the
stars. Both names signified divination, even as from the aforesaid theorems came
the term theology for the science of the language of the gods in their oracles,
auspices and auguries. Thence finally mathematics descended to measure the
earth, the measurements of which could not be ascertained save by the already
demonstrated measurements of the heavens; and the first and principal part
of mathematics bears witness to this origin in the proper name geometry by
which it is called.
740 Those two marvelous geniuses, Joseph Justus Scaliger and Denis
Petau, with their stupendous erudition, the former in his De cmendatione
tcmporum and the latter in his De doctrina temporum, failed to begin their doc-
trine at the beginning of their subject matter. For they began with the astro-
nomical year, which, as noted above, was unheard of among the nations for a
thousand years, and in any case could have assured them only of conjunctions
and oppositions of constellations and planets in the heavens, and not of any
of the things that had happened here on earth nor of their sequence (in which
the noble efforts of Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly had been expended in vain). And
on this account their work has shed little light on the beginnings or on the con-
tinuation of universal history.
[SECTION XI]
[POETIC GEOGRAPHY]
[CHAPTER I]
POETIC GEOGRAPHY
741 It remains for us now to cleanse the other eye of poetic history,
namely poetic geography. By that property of human nature included among the
Axioms [122], that "m describing unknown or distant things, in respect of
which they either have not had the true idea themselves or wish to explain it
to others who do not have it, men make use of the semblances of things known
or near at hand," poetic geography, in all its parts and as a whole, began with
restricted ideas within the confines of Greece. Then, as the Greeks went abroad
into the world, it was gradually amplified until it reached the form in which it
is now described to us. The ancient geographers agree on this truth although
they were unable to avail themselves of it, for they affirm that the ancient nations,
emigrating to strange and distant lands, gave their own native names to the
[new-found] cities, mountains, rivers, hills, straits, isles and promontories.
742 Within Greece itself, accordingly, lay the original East called Asia
or India, the West called Europe or Hesperia, the North called Thrace or
Scythia, and the South called Libya or Mauretania. And these names for the
regions of the little world of Greece were [later] applied to those of the world
[at large] in virtue of the correspondence which the Greeks observed between
the two. We have clear proof of this in the cardinal winds, which retain in their
geography the names which they must certainly have first had within Greece
itself. Thus the mares of Rhesus on the shores of the Ocean (a name, as we shall
presently find, applied to any sea of unobstructed horizon) must have been
impregnated by Zephyr, the west wind of Greece; and likewise on the shores of
the Ocean (in the above-noted primary sense) the horses of Achilles must have
been generated by Zephyr, even as the mares of Erechtheus as Aeneas tells
Achilles must have been impregnated by Boreas, the north wind of Greece.
This truth concerning the cardinal winds is confirmed by the immense projcc-
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 255
tion to which the Greek mind extended itself in taking from the mountain on
which the Homeric gods dwelt and applying to the starry Heaven the name
Olympus by which it continued to be known.
743 On these principles, the great peninsula to the east of Greece came
to be called Asia Minor when the name Asia was extended to that great eastern
part of the world which has continued to be called Asia without qualification. On
the other hand, Greece itself, which was to the west of Asia, was called Europe,
the Europe which Jove, in the form of a bull, abducted. Later the name was ex-
tended to embrace this other great continent as far as the western ocean. They
gave the name Hesperia to the western part of Greece, where the evening star
Hesperus rises in the fourth quarter of the horizon. Later they saw Italy in the
same quarter but much larger than the Hesperia of Greece, and they called it
Hesperia Magna. And finally when they reached Spain in the same direction,
they called it Hesperia Ultima. Conversely the Greeks of Italy must have called
by the name Ionia that part of Greece lying across the sea to the east of them;
hence the name Ionian for the sea between the two Greeces [Greece proper
and Magna Graecia, the Greek part of southern Italy]. Later, because of the
similarity of position of Greece proper and Asiatic Greece, the inhabitants of
Greece proper took to calling by the name Ionia the part of Asia Minor to the
east of them. It seems reasonable that out of the first Ionia Pythagoras must have
come to Italy from Samos [or Cephallenia], one of the islands ruled by Ulysses,
and not from the Samos of the second Ionia.
744 From the Thrace within Greece must have come Mars, who was
certainly a Greek divinity; and thence too must have come Orpheus, one of the
first Greek theological poets.
745 From the Scythia within Greece came Anacharsis, who left the
Scythian oracles in Greece. These must have been similar to the oracles of
Zoroaster (which must originally have been an oracular history). Anacharsis has
been received among the most ancient oracular gods. By imposture, these oracles
were later translated into dogmas of philosophy. Similarly the Orphica were
supposed to be verses of Orpheus, though, like the oracles of Zoroaster, they have
no poetic flavor and give forth too distinct an odor of the Platonic and Pythag-
orean school. So too from this Scythia [within Greece], by way of the original
Hyperboreans, the two famous oracles of Delphi and Dodona must have come
into Greece, as we suspected in the Notes on the Chronological Table. For in
Scythia, that is among these Hyperboreans of Greece proper, Anacharsis, at-
tempting to order humanity by Greek laws, was slain by Caduidas his brother.
So little did he profit by the barbarous philosophy of [which] van Heurn
[speaks] that he could not devise such laws for them himself! By the same
reasoning, Abaris must have been a Scythian too, for he is said to have written
the Scythian oracles, which must have been no other than those of Anacharsis
just mentioned. And he wrote them in that Scythia in which Idanthyrsus long
afterwards wrote with those physical objects. Whence we must conclude that
256 THE NEW SCIENCE
they were written by an impostor sometime after the introduction of the Greek
philosophies. Hence the oracles of Anacharsis were accepted by the conceit of
the scholars as oracles of esoteric wisdom, which have not come down to us.
746 Zalmoxis, who, according to Herodotus, brought to the Greeks the
dogma of the immortality of the soul, was a Getan in the same sense in which
Mars was.
747 It was likewise from a Greek India that Bacchus must have come in
triumph from the Indian East (that is, from a Greek land rich in poetic gold).
He rides triumphant in a golden chariot (a cart of grain). Hence he is also a
tamer of serpents and tigers, as Hercules is of hydras and lions, as set forth
above.
748 Certainly the name Morea, preserved by the Peloponnesus down to
our days, is ample proof that Perseus, certainly a Greek hero, carried out his
enterprises in the Mauretania within Greece; for the Peloponnesus is in the
same [geographical] relation to Achaea as Africa is to Europe. Here can be
seen how little Herodotus understood of his own antiquities (on which account
indeed Thucydides reproves him); for he relates that the Moors were at one
time white, as were certainly the Moors of his own Greece, which to this day
is called White Morea.
749 It must likewise have been from the pestilence of this Mauretania
that Aesculapius saVed his island of Cos by his art; for if he had had to save it
from the pestilence of the people of Morocco he would have had to save it from
all the pestilences in the world.
750 It was in this Mauretania that Hercules must have taken on his
shoulders the burden of the sky that old Atlas was tired of bearing; for the
name [Atlas] must originally have been used for Mt. Athos, which, on a neck
of land later cut through by Xerxes, divides Macedonia from Thrace; and here,
as a matter of fact, between Greece and Thrace, there was also a river called
Atlas. Later, at the straits of Gibraltar, when it was observed that Mts. Abyla
and Calpe on the narrows of the sea similarly separate Africa from Europe, it
was said that there Hercules had fixed the columns which, as we have said
above, support the heavens, and the name Atlas was applied to the near-by
mountain in Africa. And in this way we can find some plausibility in the answer
that Thetis gives her son Achilles in Homer: that she cannot carry his com-
plaint to Jove because he and the other gods have gone from Olympus to feast on
Atlas (based on the opinion to which we have before alluded that the gods dwelt
on the tops of the highest mountains); for if this reply had referred to Mt. Atlas
in Africa it would have been beyond belief, in view of the fact that Homer him-
self tells us that Mercury, even with wings, found the greatest difficulty in reach-
ing the isle of Calypso in the Phoenician sea, much nearer to Greece than the
kingdom we now call Morocco.
751 It was likewise from the Greek Hesperia that Hercules must have
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 257
brought the golden apples to Attica; and there too dwelt the Hespcrides (the
daughters of Atlas) who guarded them.
752 In like manner the Eridanus, into which Phaethon fell, must have
been the Danube in Greek Thrace, which flows into the Euxine. Later, when the
Greeks observed that the Po is the other river in the world which flows from
west to east like the Danube, they called it the Eridanus, and the mythologists
thus had it that Phaethon fell in Italy. But it was only the tales of their own
heroic history, not that of other nations, which the Greeks attached to the
stars, among which is Eridanus.
753 Finally, when the Greeks reached the Ocean, they expanded the nar-
row idea of any sea with an unobstructed prospect (in virtue of which Homer
said the isle of Aeolia was girt by the Ocean), and along with the idea the name
Ocean was also extended to signify the sea that girds the whole earth, which
was conceived as a great island. The power of Neptune was thus immensely en-
larged, so that from the abyss of the waters, which Plato placed in the very
bowels of the earth, he could shake it with his great trident. The crude principles
of this physics have been explained above.
754 By these principles of geography Homer can be completely vindicated
against the very grave errors which have been wrongfully imputed to him.
755 I. The Lotus Eaters of Homer, who ate the bark of a plant called
lotus, must have been nearer [than in the usual view]. For he says that it was a
nine days' journey for Ulysses from Malea to the Lotus Eaters; and if the latter,
as has been held, had dwelt beyond the straits of Gibraltar, it would have been
not merely difficult but impossible to believe that the journey was made in nine
days. This error is charged against Homer by Eratosthenes.
756 II. The Laestrygonians in Homer's time must have been a people of
Greece, and when he says that they have the longest days he must mean the
longest in Greece and not in the whole world. This passage led Aratus to locate
them under the head of Draco. Certainly Thucydides, a serious and precise
writer, speaks of the Laestrygonians in Sicily, who must have been the most
northerly people of that island.
757 III. By the same reasoning, the Cimmerians had the longest nights
of any people [not of the whole world but only] of Greece, because they were
situated in its most northerly part. Because of their long nights they were said
to dwell near the infernal regions. (Their name was later transferred to the re-
mote inhabitants about the Sea of Azov.) Hence the people of Cumae, since
they had their dwelling near the grotto of the Sybil which led to the infernal re-
gions, must have been called Cimmerians because of the supposed similarity of
location. For it is not to be believed that Ulysses, sent forth by Circe without any
incantation (inasmuch as Mercury had given him a charm against her spells, as
we have noted above), in one day could have traveled to the latter-day [and re-
mote] Cimmerians [of the Sea of Azov] to visit the lower regions, and on the
258 THE NEW SCIENCE
same day have made his return to Circeii, now Mr. Circello, not far from
Cumae.
758 On these same principles of poetic Greek geography it is possible to
solve many great difficulties in the ancient history of the East, arising from the
fact that many peoples who must have been situated in the [Near] East itself
have been taken for very distant peoples, particularly toward the north and
south.
759 What we have noted of Greek poetic geography is also found to be
true of the ancient geography of the Latins. Latium must at first have been a
very small country inasmuch as in two hundred and fifty years under the kings
Rome subdued a good twenty peoples and yet did not extend her rule more than
twenty miles, as we have remarked above. Italy was certainly circumscribed by
Cisalpine Gaul and Magna Graecia. Roman conquests later extended the name
to its present scope. Similarly the Etruscan [or Tyrrhenian] Sea must have
been quite small at the time when Horatius Cocles alone withstood all Etruria on
the bridge. Roman victories later extended it to include [the waters bathing] all
the lower coast of Italy.
760 In precisely the same way the original Pontus, to which Jason made
his naval expedition, must have been the land nearest Europe, from which it is
divided by the strait called Propontis. This land must have given its name to the
sea of Pontus. Thence the name was extended to its farther shores in Asia, where
the kingdom of Mithridates later stood. This same fable [of the Argonauts]
tells us that Aeetes, father of Medea, was born in Chalcis, a city of Euboea, an
island within Greece now called Negropont, which must have given its first
name to what is certainly still called the Black Sea. The original Crete must
have been an island within the [Greek] archipelago, which contains the laby-
rinth of islands [the Cyclades] above explained, from which Minos must have
made his raids on the Athenians. Only later did Crete move out into the Medi-
terranean, where it still remains.
761 Now, since we have returned from the Latins to the Greeks, we
may note that the latter, as they went out over the world, spread everywhere
(vainglorious men as they were!) the fame of the Trojan war and the wander-
ings of the heroes, both those of the Trojans such as Antenor, Capys and Aeneas,
and those of the Greeks such as Menelaus, Diomed and Ulysses. They observed
scattered through the world a type of nation-founder like their Theban Hercules,
and so they spread abroad the name of their Hercules, so that Varro was able to
enumerate a good forty Herculeses among the ancient nations, and affirmed that
the Latin Hercules had been called the god Fidius. Thus it came about that,
with a vainglory equalling that of the Egyptians (who said that their Jove
Ammon was the most ancient Jove in the world and that all the Herculeses of the
other nations had taken their name from the Egyptian Hercules in accord with
two axioms set forth above [193, 196] erroneously believing themselves to be
the oldest nation in the world), the Greeks caused their Hercules to wander
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 259
through all the parts of the earth, freeing it of monsters, but bringing home
nothing but the glory.
762 They observed everywhere that there had been a poetic character of
shepherds speaking in verse, such as their own Arcadian Evander; and so
Evander came from Arcadia to Latium, and there gave shelter to his compatriot
Hercules, and took to wife Carmenta, so called from carmtna, "verses." She
was the Latin inventress of letters, that is of the forms of the so-called articulated
sounds which are the matter of verses. And finally, in confirmation of all we
have been saying, the Greeks observed these poetic characters within Latium at
the same time that, as we have seen above, they found their Curetes scattered
through Saturnia (ancient Italy), Crete and Asia.
763 But these Greek words and ideas came to the Latins in extremely
barbarous times in which the nations were closed to strangers. Livy denies that
even the famous name of Pythagoras, to say nothing of the man himself, could
have reached Rome from Croton in the days of Servius Tulhus through the
many nations on the way, with their diverse languages and customs. To meet
this very difficulty we have postulated above [306], as a necessary conjecture,
that there may have been on the shore of Latium a Greek city, later shrouded in
the mists of antiquity, which taught the Latins their letters. These, as Tacitus
relates, were at first like the earliest Greek ones, which argues strongly that the
Latins received their letters from the Greeks of Latium and not from those of
Magna Graecia and much less from those of Greece proper, with whom they
had no acquaintance before the war with Tarentum which led into that with
Pyrrhus. For otherwise the Latins would ha\c used the latest Greek letters and
would not have retained their original letters which were the ancient Greek ones.
764 Thus the names of Hercules, Evander and Aeneas came into Latium
from Greece in virtue of the following customs of nations:
765 i. Just as in their barbarism they are enamored of their native
customs, so when they begin to become civilized they take pleasure in foreign
tongues as well as in foreign wares and fashions. Hence the Latins exchanged
their god Fidius for the Greek Hercules, and in place of the native oath medius
fidius they introduced mehercule, cdepol, mecastor.
766 2. In virtue of that conceit of nations we have so often noted, which
makes them boast illustrious foreign origins, particularly when the traditions of
their own barbarous times supply some motive for believing in them, the Latins
were pleased to disavow Fidius, their true founder, in favor of Hercules, the
true founder of the Greeks, and likewise to exchange the character of their own
shepherd poets for Evander of Arcadia. (Similarly, in the returned barbarism,
Giovanni Villani relates that Fiesole had been founded by Atlas and that a
Trojan king Priam had reigned in Germany.)
767 3. When nations observe foreign things which they cannot explain
with certainty in their native vocabulary, they must of necessity make use of
foreign terms.
a6o THE NEW SCIENCE
768 4. Lastly, there is the property of the earliest peoples which was dis-
cussed above in the Poetic Logic, by which they arc incapable of abstracting
qualities from subjects and therefore can only designate the qualities by naming
the subjects to which they belong. We have clear cases of this in Latin.
769 As the Romans did not know what luxury was until they observed
it in the Tarentines, they called a perfumed man a Tarentine. As they did not
know what military stratagems were until they observed them in the Cartha-
ginians, they called them punicas artes, "Carthaginian arts/* As they did not
know what pomp was until they observed it in the Capuans, they used the
phrase supercthum campanicum for pomp and pride. In like fashion, Numa and
Ancus were called Sabine because the Romans could not otherwise express a
religiousness such as that for which the Sabines were distinguished. Servius
Tullius was called Greek because they had no word for astuteness, an idea which
must have remained unexpressed until they came to know the Greeks of the
conquered city of which we were just speaking [763 |; and he was also called a
slave because they could not otherwise express his weakness in yielding bonitary
ownership of the fields to the plebeians by bringing them the first agrarian law,
as shown above, on which account, perhaps, the fathers had him slain. For
astuteness is a property which goes with weakness, and both alike were foreign
to Roman straightforwardness and valor. For those who affirm that Rome did
not have within herself heroes worthy of kingship, so that she had to submit to
the rule of a low-born slave, do a great injustice to the origins of Rome and
offend overmuch the wisdom of Romulus her founder. Such is the honor done
him by the critics who have occupied themselves with the writers. It is of a
piece with the later tribute to the effect that the Romans, having founded a
powerful empire in Latium and maintained it against all the power of Etruria,
had to seek like lawless barbarians through Italy, Magna Graecia and Greece
proper for laws to order their liberty: all to sustain the credit of the fable that
the Law of the Twelve Tables came to Rome from Athens.
[CHAPTER II]
COROLLARY ON THE COMING OF AENEAS INTO ITALY
770 In the light of all our previous discussion, it can now be shown how
Aeneas came into Italy and founded the Roman nation in Alba, from which the
Romans draw their origin. Our Greek city on the shore of Latium must have
been a Greek city from Asia, where Troy was, and must have been unknown
to the Romans until they extended their conquests from the hinterland down to
the near-by sea. This they began to do under Ancus Marcius, third of the Roman
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 261
kings. He initiated such conquests with Ostia, the maritime city so close to Rome
that as the latter afterwards expanded immoderately it made Ostia its port. Thus,
just as the Romans had received the Latin Arcadians who were fugitives by land,
so later they took under their protection the Phrygians who were fugitives by
sea, and by heroic right of war they demolished the city. And thus both Ar-
cadians and Phrygians, by two anachronisms, the former by that of postdating
and the latter by that of predating, took refuge in the asylum of Romulus.
771 For if this is not the way things went, then the origin of Rome from
Aeneas confounds and baffles any understanding, as we pointed out in the
Axioms [307]. In order to avoid such bafflement and confusion, the scholars
from Livy on down have treated that origin as fabulous, failing to consider that,
as we have said in the Axioms [149], the fables must have had some public
motive of truth. For Evander is so powerful in Latium that he receives and
shelters Hercules there some five hundred years before the founding of Rome,
and Aeneas founds the royal house of Alba, which, under a succession of four-
teen kings, so waxes in prestige as to become the capital of Latium; and the Ar-
cadians and Phrygians, after so long a vagabondage, finally repaired to the
asylum of Romulus! We may well ask how a shepherd folk knowing nothing of
seafaring and coming from Arcadia, an inland part of Greece, could cross such
an expanse of water and penetrate into mid-Latium, when Ancus Marcius, third
king after Romulus, was the first to take a colony down to the near-by seacoast.
And how they got to Latium, along with the dispersed Phrygians, a good two
hundred years before the time of which Livy writes when he tells us that not
even the name of Pythagoras, so celebrated in Magna Graecia, could reach
Rome from Croton through the many intervening nations of diverse languages
and customs. And, for that matter, four hundred years before the Tarentines
had heard of the Romans, who were already a powerful people in Italy.
772 Nevertheless, as we have often stated in conformity with one of the
axioms set forth above [149], these vulgar traditions must from the beginning
have had great public grounds of truth, since an entire nation has so long
preserved them. What then must we say? We must assume that some Greek
city had stood on the shore of Latium, just as so many others stood and remained
afterward on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea. This city must have been con-
quered by the Romans before the time of the Law of the Twelve Tables, and,
by the heroic right of such barbarous victories, the Romans must have demol-
ished it and received the vanquished inhabitants in the quality of heroic socii.
And in the language of poetic characters these Greeks must have called Ar-
cadians the vagabonds who wandered by land through the forests, and Phrygians
those who wandered by sea, just as the Romans described as received into the
asylum of Romulus the vanquished who surrendered to them and whom they
took in as laborers under the clienteles established by Romulus when he opened
the asylum in the clearing for those who came thither as refugees. Out of such
conquered and surrendered men (whom we may assign to the period between
262 THE NEW SCIENCE
the expulsion of the kings and the Law of the Twelve Tables) the Roman
plebeians must have emerged under the agrarian law of Servius Tullius, who
had granted them bonitary ownership of the fields. Because this was not to the
liking of Coriolanus, he sought, as we said above, to reduce [the plebeians to
their previous condition as] Romulus's laborers. Subsequently, as the Greeks
broadcast everywhere the tale of the Trojan war and the wanderings of the
heroes, and particularly in Italy the voyage of Aeneas because in that country
they had already discovered their Hercules, their Evander and their Curetes (as
noted above), it thus came about in the course of time that these traditions were
altered and finally corrupted on the lips of a barbarous people. So, as we say,
Aeneas became the founder of the Roman people in Latium, though according
to Bochart he never set foot in Italy, though Strabo says he never left Troy, and
though Homer, of more weight here, relates that he died in Troy and left his
kingdom to his descendants. Thus, by two different manifestations of the con-
ceit of the nations that of the Greeks in making such a stir about the Trojan
war, and that of the Romans in boasting an illustrious foreign origin the
Greeks foisted their Aeneas upon the Romans and the latter finally accepted him
as their founder.
773 This fable could not have arisen before the time of the war with
Pyrrhus, for it was only then that the Romans began to find pleasure in Greek
things. It is a habit we find nations acquiring only after long and extensive deal-
ings with foreigners.
[CHAPTER III]
THE DENOMINATION AND DESCRIPTION OF THE HEROIC CITIES
774 Now, since the parts of geography are nomenclature and chorog-
raphy, that is to say the denomination and description of places, principally of
cities, it remains for us to examine these matters in order to complete our dis-
cussion of poetic wisdom.
775 We have seen above that the heroic cities were founded by providence
in natural strongholds, to which the ancient Latins in their divine age must have
given the sacred name arae, "altars." They must also have called these strong
positions arces, "fortresses"; for in the returned barbarian times the seigniories
were called [in Italian] rocche, from rocce, "steep and precipitous rocks," and
later castella. In like manner the name arae must have been extended to the
whole district held by a heroic city, which, as above noted, was called ager when
considered with reference to the frontiers dividing it from foreigners, and
territorium when considered with reference to the jurisdiction of the city over
BOOK II. POETIC WISDOM 263
its citizens. On all this there is a golden passage in Tacitus describing the ara
maxima of Hercules in Rome, and because this passage gives strong support to
these principles we shall quote it in full: Igitur a foro boario, ubi aeneum bovis
simulacrum adspicimus, quia id genus animalium aratro subditur, sulcus desig-
nandi oppidi captus, ut magnam Herculis aram complccteretur, ara Herculis
crat * "From the ox market, then, where we see the brazen statue of a bull be-
cause that is the animal commonly yoked to the plough, a furrow was drawn to
mark out the town, so as to embrace the great altar of Hercules [and the land
itself within that furrowed circuit] was the [original] altar of Hercules.'* There
is another golden passage in Sallust telling of the famous altar of the brothers
Phiiaeni [Philaenorum Arae] left as a boundary marker between the Cartha-
ginian and Cyrenaic empires.
776 All ancient geography is strewn with such altars. To begin with
Asia, Keller in his Notitia orbis antiqui states that all the cities of Syria had the
word Aram placed before or after their specific designations, whence Syria
itself was called Aramea or Aramia. But in Greece Theseus founded the city of
Athens on the famous altar of the unhappy, properly considering unhappy
those lawless and impious men who, from the brawling of their infamous com-
munism, took recourse to the fortified lands of the strong, as we have said above,
all solitary, weak and needful of all the benefits that the pious had derived from
their humanity. And thus in Greek the word ara also meant "vow," because on
these first altars of the gentile world, as we have also set forth above, the first
victims (called Saturni hostiae, as noted above) the first anathemata (trans-
lated into Latin as diris devoti) who were the violent and impious men who
dared to enter the cultivated fields of the strong in pursuit of the weak who had
fled thither to escape them (whence perhaps the use of campare in the sense of
saving oneself), were consecrated to Vesta and slain. Hence in Latin supphaum
meant both punishment and sacrifice, as used by Saiiust among others. To this
double meaning in Latin there is a close correspondence in Greek, for the word
ara, which as we have said means "vow," has also the sense of noxa, "the body
that has done the harm," and also that of dirac, "the Furies"; and precisely such
were these first devoti, the vowed or devoted men of whom we just spoke (and
of whom we shall have more to say in Book IV), for they were consecrated to
the Furies and then sacrificed on these first altars of the gentile world. So the
word hara, which survived in the sense of "coop" or "pen," must have meant to
the ancient Latins the victim. From this word, certainly, is derived aruspex, he
who divines from the entrails of victims slain before the altars.
777 From what we were saying of the ara maxima of Hercules, it was
on an altar similar to that of Theseus that Romulus must have founded Rome
within the asylum opened in the grove; for it remained true among the Latins
that never was there mention of a lucus or "sacred wood" without allusion to an
1 Annals XII 24; ara Herculis crat added by Vico,
264 THE NEW SCIENCE
altar erected .therein to some divinity. So by telling us that in general the
asylums were an ancient counsel of founders of cities, vetus urbes condcntium
consilium, Livy discloses to us the reason why in ancient geography we read of
so many cities with the name Arae. Whence too we must admit that it was with
knowledge of this antiquity that Cicero called the Senate ara sociorum, for it was
to the Senate that the provinces carried their complaints regarding accounting
against governors that had governed them avariciously, thereby recalling the
origin of the provinces from these first socii in the world.
778 We have already shown that the heroic cities in Asia and, as regards
Europe, in Greece and Italy were called Arae or altars. In Africa, according to
Sallust, the aforesaid altar of the brothers Philaeni, Arae Philaenorum, remained
famous. In the north, coming back to Europe, Altars of the Sicilians [Szekelyek
Retze] is still the term applied to the cities in Transylvania inhabited by an
ancient Hunnish nation made up of noble farmers and shepherds, which, with
the Hungarians and the Saxons, compose that province. For Germany, we read
of an Ara Ubiorum in Tacitus. In Spain ara is still a part of the names of many
cities. But in the Syrian language the word art means lion; and above, in the
natural theogony of the twelve major divinities, we showed that from the de-
fense of their altars the Greeks conceived the idea of Mars, whom they called
Ares; so that, with the same idea of strength, in the returned barbarian times
many cities and noble houses charged their arms with lions. This word ara,
uniform in sound and meaning in so many nations widely separated from each
other by space, time and customs, must have been the root of the Latin word
aratrum, plough, the moldboard of which was called urbs. And the Latins must
also have derived from ara the words arx, "fortress/* and arceo, "to repel,"
whence the phrase ager arcifinius used by writers on the boundaries of fields.
Hence also the words arma and arcus, "arms" and "bow." For they justly con-
ceived strength to consist in thrusting back harm and holding it at a distance.
[CONCLUSION]
779 We have shown that poetic wisdom justly deserves two great and
sovereign tributes. The one, clearly and constantly accorded to it, is that of
having founded gentile mankind, though the conceit of the nations on the one
hand and that of the scholars on the other, the former with ideas of an empty
magnificence and the latter with ideas of an impertinent philosophical wisdom,
have in effect denied it this honor by their very efforts to affirm it. The other,
concerning which a vulgar tradition has come down to us, is that the wisdom of
the ancients made its wise men, by a single inspiration, equally great as philoso-
phers, lawmakers, captains, historians, orators and poets, on which account it
has been so greatly sought after. But in fact it made or rather sketched them
such as we have found them in the fables. For in these, as in embryos or matrices,
we have discovered the outlines of all esoteric wisdom. And it may be said that
in the fables the nations have in a rough way and in the language of the human
senses described the beginnings of this world of sciences, which the specialized
studies of scholars have since clarified for us by reasoning and generalization.
From all this we may conclude what we set out to show in this [second] book:
that the theological poets were the sense and the philosophers the intellect of
human wisdom.
BOOK THREE
DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER
[SECTION I]
[SEARCH FOR THE TRUE HOMER]
[INTRODUCTION]
780 Although our demonstration in the preceding book that poetic
wisdom was the vulgar wisdom of the peoples of Greece, who were first theo-
logical and later heroic poets, should carry as a necessary consequence that the
wisdom of Homer was not at all different in kind, yet, as Plato left firmly
fixed the opinion that Homer was endowed with sublime esoteric wisdom (and
all the other philosophers have followed in his train, with [pseudo-] Plutarch
foremost, writing an entire book on the matter), we shall here examine particu-
larly if Homer was ever a philosopher. On this question another complete book
was written by Dionysius Longinus, which is mentioned by Diogenes Laertius
in his life of Pyrrho.
[CHAPTER I]
THE ESOTERIC WISDOM ATTRIBUTED TO HOMER
781 Let us concede to Homer what certainly must be granted, that he
had to conform to the quite vulgar sensibilities and hence the vulgar customs
of the barbarous Greece of his day, for such vulgar perceptions and vulgar
customs provide the poets with their proper materials. Let us therefore concede
to him what he narrates: that the gods are esteemed according to their strength,
as by his supreme strength Jove attempts to show, in the fable of the great chain,
that he is the king of men and gods, as we have observed above. On the basis of
this vulgar opinion he makes it credible that Diomed can wound Venus and
Mars with the help of Minerva, who, in the contest of the gods, despoils Venus
and strikes Mars with a rock (and Minerva forsooth was the goddess of philoso-
ayo THE NEW SCIENCE
phy in vulgar belief, and uses weapons so worthy of the wisdom of Jove!), Let
us allow him to tell of the inhuman custom (so contrary to what the writers on
the natural law of nations claim to have been eternally practiced among the na-
tions) which then prevailed among the barbarous peoples of Greece (who are
held to have spread humanity through the world): to wit, that of poisoning
arrows (for Ulysses goes to Ephyra to seek poisonous herbs for this purpose),
and further, that of denying burial to enemies slain in battle, leaving their un-
buried bodies instead as a prey to dogs and vultures (on which account the un-
happy Priam found so costly the ransom of his son's body, though the naked
corpse of Hector had already been dragged by Achilles's chariot three times
around the walls of Troy).
782 Nevertheless, if the purpose of poetry is to tame the ferocity of the
vulgar whose teachers the poets are, it was not the part of a wise man, versed in
such fierce sensibilities and customs, to arouse admiration of them in the vulgar
in order that they should take pleasure in them and be confirmed in them by
that pleasure. Nor was it the part of a wise man to arouse pleasure in the
villainous vulgar at the villainies of the gods, to say nothing of the heroes. As
for example we read of Mars in the midst of the contest calling Minerva a dog-fly,
and of Minerva punching Diana, and of Agamemnon and Achilles, the latter
the greatest of the Greek heroes and the former the head of the Greek league,
and both of them kings, calling each other dogs, as servants in popular comedies
would scarcely do nowadays.
783 But what name under Heaven more appropriate than sheer stupidity
can be given to the wisdom of his captain Agamemnon ? For he has to be com-
pelled by Achilles to do his duty in restoring Chryseis to Chryses, her father,
priest of Apollo, the god who, on account of this rape, was decimating the
Greek army with a cruel pestilence. And then, holding himself offended, Aga-
memnon thought to regain his honor by an act of justice of a piece with his
wisdom, by wrongfully stealing Briseis from Achilles, who bore in his person the
fate of Troy, so that, on his withdrawing in anger with his men and ships,
Hector might make short work of the Greeks still surviving the pestilence.
Here is the Homer hitherto considered the architect of Greek policy or civiliza-
tion, beginning with such an episode the thread with which he weaves the whole
Iliad t the principal actors of which are such a captain and a hero such as we have
shown Achilles to be when we spoke of the Heroism of the First Peoples. Here
is the Homer unrivaled in creating poetic characters, as we shall show him to be
farther on, of whom the very greatest are so discordant with this civil human
nature of ours. Yet they are perfectly decorous in relation to the punctilious
heroic nature, as we have said above.
784 What are we then to say of his representing his heroes as delighting
so much in wine, and, whenever they are troubled in spirit, finding all their
comfort, yes, and above all others the prudent Ulysses, in getting drunk? Fine
precepts for consolation, most worthy of a philosopher I
BOOK III. DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER 271
785 Scaliger is indignant at finding almost all his comparisons to be
taken from beasts and other savage things. But even if we admit that they were
necessary to Homer in order to make^himself better understood by the wild and
savage vulgar, nevertheless to attain such success in them for his comparisons
are incomparable is certainly not characteristic of a mind chastened and
civilized by any sort of philosophy. Nor could the truculent and savage style in
which he describes so many, such varied and such bloody battles, so many and
such extravagantly cruel kinds of butchery as make up all the sublimity of the
Iliad in particular, have originated in a mind humanized and softened by any
philosophy.
786 The constancy, moreover, which is developed and fixed by the study
of the wisdom of the philosophers, could not have depicted gods and heroes of
such instability. For some, at the slightest suggestion of contrary sentiment,
however deeply moved or distressed they may be, become quiet and tranquil;
others, while burning with violent wrath, if they chance to recall some sad
event, break into bitter tears. (Just so, in the returned barbarism of Italy, at the
end of which came Dante, the Tuscan Homer, who also sang only of history, we
read of Cola di Rienzo, whose biography we said above exhibited vividly the
customs of the Greek heroes as described by Homer, that when he spoke of the
unhappy Roman state oppressed by the great of that time, both he and his
hearers broke down in uncontrollable tears.) Others, conversely, when deep in
grief, if some pleasant diversion offers itself, like the banquet of Alcinous in the
case of the wise Ulysses, completely forget their troubles and give themselves
over to hilarity. Others, quiet and calm, at some innocent remark which is not
to their humor, react with such violence and fly into such a blind rage as to
threaten the speaker with a frightful death. So it is with Achilles when he re-
ceives Priam in his tent on the aforementioned occasion when the latter, pro-
tected by Mercury, has come through the Greek camp by night and all alone in
order to ransom the body of Hector. Achilles receives him at dinner and, be-
cause of a little phrase that does not please him and which has fallen inadver-
tently from the mouth of the unhappy father grieving for such a valorous son,
flies into a rage. Forgetting the sacred laws of hospitality, unmindful of the
simple faith in which Priam has come all alone to him because he trusts com-
pletely in him alone, unmoved by the many great misfortunes of such a king or
by pity for such a father or by the veneration due to so old a man, heedless of
the common lot which avails more than anything else to arouse compassion, he
allows his bestial wrath to reach such a point as to thunder at him that he "will
cut off his head." The same Achilles, even while impiously determined not to
forgive a private injury at the hands of Agamemnon (which grave though it
was could not justly be avenged by the ruin of their fatherland and of their
entire nation), is pleased he who carries with him the fate of Troy to see all
the Greeks fall to ruin and suffer miserable defeat at Hector's hands, nor is he
moved by love of country or by his nation's glory to bring them any aid. He does
272 THE NEW SCIENCE
it finally only to satisfy a purely private grief, the slaying of his friend Patroclus
by Hector. And not even in death is he placated for the loss of his Briseis until
the unhappy beautiful royal maiden Polyjpa, of the ruined house of the once
rich and puissant Priam, but now become a miserable slave, has been sacrificed
before his tomb, and his ashes, thirsting for vengeance, have drunk up the last
drop of her blood. To say nothing of what is really past understanding: that a
philosopher's gravity and propriety of thought could have been possessed by a
man who amused himself by inventing so many fables worthy of old women en-
tertaining children, as those with which Homer stuffed his other poem, the
Odyssey.
787 Such crude, coarse, wild, savage, volatile, unreasonable or unrea-
sonably obstinate, frivolous and foolish customs as we set forth in the second
book in the Corollaries on the Heroic Nature, can pertain only to men who are
like children in the weakness of their minds, like women in the vigor of their
imaginations and like violent youths in the turbulence of their passions; whence
we must deny to Homer any kind of esoteric wisdom. These are the considera-
tions which first gave rise to the doubts that put us under the necessity of seek-
ing out the true Homer.
[CHAPTER II]
HOMER'S FATHERLAND
788 Such was the esoteric wisdom hitherto attributed to Homer; let us
now examine his origin. Almost all the cities of Greece claimed to be his birth-
place and there were not lacking those who asserted that he was an Italian
Greek. To determine his native land Leo Allacci in his De f atria Homeri spends
much effort in vain. But since there has come down to us no writer more ancient
than Homer, as Josephus stoutly maintains against the grammarian Apion, and
since the writers came long after him, we are obliged to apply our metaphysical
criticism, treating him as the founder of a nation as he is held to be of Greece, and
to discover the truth, both as to his age and as to his fatherland, from Homer
himself.
789 Certainly, as regards the Homer who was author of the Odyssey, we
are assured that he must have come from the west of Greece and a little toward
the south, as evidenced by that golden passage in which Alcinous, king of the
Phaeacians in what is now Corfu, offers to Ulysses, who is anxious to be on his
way, a well-fitted ship manned by his vassals. These, he says, are expert mariners
who could take the hero, if need were, as far as Euboea (now Negropont),
which, by the report of those whom chance had taken thither, was a land far
BOOK III. DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER 273
away, a sort of Ultima Thule of the Greeks. This passage shows clearly that the
Homer of the Odyssey was not the same as the Homer of the Iliad, for Euboea
was not far from Troy, which was sitqated in Asia near the shore of the Helles-
pont, on the narrow strait of which there are now two fortresses called the
Dardanelles, a name recalling to this day its origin from that of Dardania, the
ancient territory of Troy. And certainly we find in Seneca that there was a
celebrated debate among the grammarians as to whether the Iliad and the Odys-
sey were by the same author.
790 As for the contest among the Greek cities for the honor of claiming
Homer as citizen, it came about because almost all of them observed in his
poems words and phrases and dialectical locutions that belonged to their own
vernaculars.
791 What has been said here will serve for the discovery of the true
Homer.
[CHAPTER III]
THE AGE OF HOMER
792 We find evidence regarding the age of Homer in the following
passages of his poems.
I
793 For the funeral of Patroclus, Achilles causes to be played almost all
the kinds of games that were later played in the Olympics when Greek civiliza-
tion was at its height.
II
794 The arts of casting in bas-relief and of engraving on metals had
already been invented, as is shown, among other examples, by the shield of
Achilles, to which we have referred above. Painting had not yet been invented.
For casting abstracts the surfaces of things along with some relief, and en-
graving does the same with some depth; but painting abstracts the surfaces
absolutely, and this is a labor calling for the greatest ingenuity. Hence neither
Homer nor Moses ever mentions anything painted, and this is an argument of
their antiquity.
Ill
795 The delights of the gardens of Alcinous, the magnificence of his
palace and the sumptuousness of his banquets indicate to us that the Greeks had
reached the stage of admiring luxury and pomp.
274 TO HEW SCIENCE
IV
796 The Phoenicians were already bringing to Greek shores ivory,
purple, Arabian incense used to perfume the grotto of Venus; further, a linen
finer than the outer skin of an onion, embroidered garments, and, among the
gifts of the suitors, one [such garment] for the adornment of Penelope, draped
on a frame contrived with such delicate springs that they stretched it out in the
fuller places and drew it in in the slender places. An invention worthy of the
effeminacy of our day!
797 The coach of Priam, in which he drives to Achilles, is made of
cedar wood, and the cave of Calypso is fragrant with its perfumes, which be-
trays a sensuous refinement that was still foreign to the pleasure of the Romans
when they were most bent on wasting their substance m luxury in the days of
Nero and Heliogabalus.
VI
798 We read of voluptuous baths in the dwelling of Circe.
VII
799 The youthful servants of the suitors are handsome, graceful and
blonde-haired, even as the amenity of our present customs would demand.
VIII
800 The men care for their hair like women; this is a reproach brought
against the effeminate Paris by Hector and Diomed.
IX
801 It is true that Homer describes his heroes as always eating roast
meats. This is the simplest and easiest way of cooking them, since it requires
nothing but live coals. This practice was retained in the case of sacrifices, and
the Romans used the term prosiicia for the meat of the victims roasted on the
altars, which was then cut up and divided among the guests. In later times,
however, it was roasted on spits just like unconsecrated meat. So Achilles on the
occasion of the dinner with Priam cuts up the lamb and Patroclus then roasts
it [on a spit], prepares the table and puts bread upon it in the serving baskets;
for the heroes celebrated no banquets which were not sacrificial in nature, with
themselves in the character of priests. Among the Latins these survived in the
epulae, sumptuous banquets given usually by the great, in the epulum, a public
feast for the people, and in the sacred banquet of which the priests called epulones
partook. Agamemnon himself, accordingly, kills the two lambs whose sacrifice
consecrates the terms of the war with Priam. Such was the magnificence at that
time of an idea we would now associate with a butcher! Only after this stage must
BOOK III. DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER 275
have come boiled meats, for in addition to fire they require water, a kettle and
along with it a tripod. Vergil has his heroes eat this kind of meat also, and he
has them roast meat on spits. Last of all came seasoned foods, which, besides the
things already mentioned, called also for condiments. Now, to get back to the
heroic banquets of Homer, though he describes the most delicate food of the
Greeks as made of flour, cheese and honey, yet two of his similes are drawn from
fishing. And Ulysses, when pretending to be poor and asking alms of one of the
suitors, tells him that the gods give to hospitable kings, that is those who are
charitable to poor wanderers, seas abounding in fish, which are the greatest de-
light of the table.
X
802 Lastly (and what is more to our purpose), Homer seems to have ap-
peared at a time when heroic law had already decayed in Greece and the period
of popular liberty had begun, for his heroes contract marriages with foreigners
and bastards succeed to kingdoms. And so indeed it must have been, for, long
since, Hercules, stained by the blood of the ugly centaur Nessus, had gone forth
in madness and died; signifying, as we explained in the second book, the end
of heroic law.
803 As therefore with regard to the age of Homer we are unwilling to
scorn authority altogether, in all these matters gathered and noted from his
poems themselves (not as much from the Iliad as from the Odyssey, which
Dionysius Longinus holds was composed in Homer's old age), we find support
for the opinion of those who place him long after the Trojan war. The time
runs to the extent of 460 years, or until about the period of Numa. Indeed, we
believe we are humoring them in not assigning him to a time even nearer our
own. For they say it was after Numa's time that Psammeticus opened Egypt
to the Greeks. Yet the Greeks, as appears from numerous passages particularly
in the Odyssey, had long since opened their own country to commerce with the
Phoenicians, whose tales no less than their merchandise the Greek peoples had
come to delight in, just as Europeans do now in those of the Indies. There is
thus no contradiction between these two facts: on the one hand that Homer
never saw Egypt, and on the other that he recounts so many things of Egypt and
Libya, of Phoenicia and Asia, and above all of Italy and Sicily; for these things
had been related to the Greeks by the Phoenicians.
804 Yet we do not see how to reconcile so many refined customs with
the many wild and savage ones which he attributes to his heroes at the same
time, and particularly in the Iliad. So that, lest barbarous acts be confounded
with gentle ones ne pladdis coeant immitia we must suppose that the two
poems were composed and compiled by various hands through successive ages.
805 Thus, from what we have here said of the fatherland and of the
age of Homer as he has hitherto been held to be, our doubts take courage for
the search for the true Homer.
376 THE NEW SCIENCE
[CHAPTER IV]
HOMER'S MATCHLESS FACULTY FOR HEROIC POETRY
806 The complete absence of philosophy which we have shown in Homer,
and our discoveries concerning his fatherland and his age, arouse in us a strong
suspicion that he may perhaps have been quite simply a man of the people. This
suspicion is confirmed by Horace's observation in his Art of Poetry concerning
the desperate difficulty of creating fresh characters or persons of tragedy after
Homer, on account of which he advises poets to take their characters from
Homer's poems. Now this grave difficulty must be taken in conjunction with
the fact that the personages of the New Comedy are all of artificial creation;
indeed there was an Athenian law requiring the New Comedy to appear on the
stage with characters entirely fictitious, and the Greeks managed this so suc-
cessfully that the Latins, for all their pride, despaired of competing, as Quin-
tilian acknowledged in saying: Cum graecis de comoedia non contendimus, "We
do not contend with the Greeks in comedy."
807 To Horace's difficulty we must add two others of wider scope. For
one thing, how is it that Homer, who came first, was such an inimitable heroic
poet, while tragedy, which was born later, began with the crudeness familiar
to everybody and which we shall later describe more in detail? And for another,
how is it that Homer, who preceded philosophy and the poetic and critical arts,
was yet the most sublime of all the sublime poets, and that after the invention
of philosophies and of the arts of poetry and criticism there was no poet who
could come within a long distance of competing with him? However, putting
aside our two difficulties, that of Horace combined with what we have said of
the New Comedy should have spurred scholars like Patrizzi, Scaliger and
Castelvetro and other valiant masters of the poetic art to investigate the reason
for the difference.
808 The reason cannot be found elsewhere than in the origin of poetry,
as discovered above in the Poetic Wisdom, and consequently in the discovery
of the poetic characters in which alone consists the essence of poetry itself. For
the New Comedy portrays our present human customs, on which the Socratic
philosophy had meditated, and hence, from the latter's general maxims con-
cerning human morals, the Greek poets, profoundly steeped in that doctrine
(as was Menander for example, in comparison with whom Terence was called
even by the Latins "half a Menander"), could create certain luminous examples
of ideal men, by the light and splendor of which they might awaken the vulgar,
who are as quick to learn from convincing examples as they are incapable of
BOOK III. DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER 277
understanding from reasoned maxims. The Old Comedy took arguments or
subjects from real life and made plays of them just as they were, as the wicked
Aristophanes once did with the good Socrates, thus bringing on his ruin. But
tragedy puts on the scene heroic hatred, scorn, wrath and revenge, which spring
from sublime natures which naturally are the source of sentiments, modes of
speech and actions in general that are wild, crude and terrible. Such arguments
are clothed with an air of marvel, and all these matters are in closest conformity
among themselves and uniform in their subjects. Such works the Greeks could
produce only in the time of their heroism, at the end of which Homer must have
come. This is shown by the following metaphysical criticism. The fables, which
at their birth had come forth direct and proper, reached Homer distorted and
perverted. As may be seen throughout the Poetic Wisdom above set forth, they
were all at first true histories, which were gradually altered and corrupted, and
in their corrupt form finally came down to Homer. Hence he must be assigned
to the third age of the heroic poets. The first age invented the fables to serve as
true narratives, the primary and proper meaning of the word mythos, as de-
fined by the Greeks themselves, being "true narration.'* The second altered and
corrupted them. The third and last, that of Homer, received them thus cor-
rupted.
809 But, to return to our purpose, for the reason assigned by us to this
effect, Aristotle in his Poetics says that only Homer knew how to invent poetic
falsehoods. For his poetic characters, which are incomparable for the sublime
appropriateness which Horace admires in them, were imaginative universals, as
defined above in the Poetic Metaphysics, to which the peoples of Greece attached
all the various particulars belonging to each genus. To Achilles, for example,
who is the subject of the Iliad, they attached all the properties of heroic valor,
and all the sentiments and customs arising from these natural properties, such as
those of quick temper, punctiliousness, wrathfulness, implacability, violence,
the arrogation of all right to might, as they are summed up by Horace in his
description of this character. To Ulysses, the subject of the Odyssey, they attached
all the sentiments and customs of heroic wisdom, that is, those of wanness, pa-
tience, dissimulation, duplicity, deceit, always preserving propriety of speech
and indifference of action, so that others may of themselves fall into error and
may be the causes of their own deception. And to these two characters, accord-
ing to kind, they attached those actions of particular men which were con-
spicuous enough to arouse and move the still dull and stupid Greeks to note
them and refer them to their kinds. These two characters, since they had been
created by an entire nation, could only be conceived as naturally uniform (in
which uniformity, agreeable to the common sense of an entire nation, alone
consists the decorum or beauty and charm of a fable); and, since they were
created by powerful imaginations, they could not be created as anything but
sublime. Hence derive two eternal properties of poetry: one that poetic sub-
limity is inseparable from popularity, and the other that peoples who have first
278 THE NEW SCIENCE
created heroic characters for themselves will afterwards apprehend human [or
civilized] customs only in terms of characters made famous by luminous ex-
amples.
[CHAPTER V]
PHILOSOPHICAL PROOFS FOR THE DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER
810 In view of what we have stated, the following philosophical proofs
may be assembled.
I
811 First of all, the one enumerated above among the Axioms [201],
which states that men are naturally led to preserve the memories of the orders
and laws that keep them within their societies.
II
812 The truth understood by Castelvetro, that history must have come
first and then poetry*, for history is a simple statement of the truth but poetry is
an imitation at a second remove. Yet this scholar, though otherwise most acute,
failed to make use of this truth to discover the true principles of poetry by com-
bining it with the other philosophical proof which follows here.
Ill
813 Inasmuch as the poets came certainly before the vulgar historians,
the first history must have been poetic,
IV
814 The fables in their origin were true and severe narrations (whence
mythos, "fable," was defined as vera narratio, as we have frequently noted). But
because for the most part they were originally monstrous, they were later mis-
appropriated, then altered, subsequently became improbable, after that obscure,
then scandalous and finally incredible. These are the seven sources of the dif-
ficulties of the fables, which can all easily be found throughout the second book.
V
815 And, as we have shown in the same book, they were received by
Homer in this corrupt and distorted form.
BOOK III. DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER 279
VI
816 The poetic characters, in which the essence of the fables consists,
were born of the need of a nature incapable of abstracting forms and properties
from subjects, Consequently they must have been the manner of thinking of
entire peoples, who had been placed under this natural necessity in the times of
their greatest barbarism. It is an eternal property of the fables always to magnify
the ideas of particulars. On this there is a fine passage in Aristotle's Ethics in
which he remarks that men of limited ideas erect every particular into a maxim.
The reason must be that the human mind, which is indefinite, being constricted
by the vigor of the senses, cannot otherwise express its almost divine nature
than by thus magnifying particulars in imagination. It is perhaps on this account
that in both the Greek and the Latin poets the images of gods and heroes always
appear larger than those of men, and that in the returned barbarian times the
paintings particularly of the Eternal Father, of Jesus Christ and of the Virgin
Mary are exceedingly large.
VII
817 Since barbarians lack reflection, which, when ill used, is the mother
of falsehood, the first heroic Latin poets sang true histories, that is, the Roman
wars. And in the returned barbarian times, in virtue of this nature of barbarism,
the Latin poets like Gunther, William of Apulia and others again sang nothing
but history, and the romancers of the same period thought they were writing
true histories. Even Boiardo and Ariosto, who came in an age illuminated by
philosophy, took the subjects of their poems from the history of Bishop Turpin
of Paris. And in virtue of this same nature of barbarism, which for lack of re-
flection does not know how to feign (whence it is naturally truthful, open,
faithful, generous and magnanimous), even Dante, though learned in the loftiest
esoteric knowledge, filled the scenes of his Comedy with real persons and por-
trayed real events in the lives of the dead. For that reason he gave the name
Comedy to his poem, for the Old Comedy of the Greeks, as we have said above,
portrayed real persons in its plays. In this respect Dante was like the Homer
of the Iliad, which Dionysius Longinus says is all dramatic or representative, as
the Odyssey is all narrative, Francesco Petrarca too, though a most learned man,
yet sang in Latin of the second Carthaginian war, and his Tnonfi, in Tuscan,
which have a heroic note, are nothing but a collection of histories. And here we
have a luminous proof of the fact that the first fables were histories. For satire
spoke ill of persons not only real but well known; tragedy took for its argu-
ments characters of poetic history; the Old Comedy put into its plots illustrious
living persons; the New Comedy, born in times of the most lively reflection,
finally invented characters entirely fictitious (just as in the Italian language the
New Comedy came in again only with the marvelously learned Cinquecento) :
28o THE NEW SCIENCE
and neither among the Greeks nor among the Latins was an entirely fictitious
character ever the protagonist of a tragedy. Strong confirmation of this is found
in the popular taste which will not accept musical dramas, the arguments of
which are always tragic, unless they are taken from history, whereas it will
tolerate fictitious plots in comedies because, since they deal with private life
which is not public knowledge, it believes them true.
VIII
818 Since poetic characters are of this nature, their poetic allegories, as
we have shown above throughout the Poetic Wisdom, must necessarily contain
historical significations referring only to the earliest times of Greece.
IX
819 Such histories must naturally have been preserved in the memories
of the communities of the peoples, in virtue of the first philosophical proof just
mentioned; for, as the children of the nations, they must have had marvelously
strong memories. And this was not without divine providence, for up to the
time of Homer and indeed somewhat afterwards, common script had not yet
been invented (on the authority of Josephus against Apion, which we have
already cited several times). In that human indigence, the peoples, who were
almost all body and almost no reflection, must have been all vivid sensation in
perceiving particulars, strong imagination in apprehending and magnifying
them, sharp wit in referring them to their imaginative genera and robust
memory in retaining them. It is true that these faculties appertain to the mind,
but they have their roots in the body and draw their strength from it. Hence
memory is the same as imagination, which for that reason is called memoria
in Latin. (In Terence, for example, we find memorabile in the sense of "imagi-
nable," and commonly we find comminisci for "feigning," which is proper to
the imagination, and thence commentum for a fiction.) Imagination is likewise
taken for wit or ingenuity. (In the returned barbarian times an ingenious man
was called imaginative [jantastico] ; so, for example, Cola di Rienzo is described
by his contemporary biographer.) Memory thus has three different aspects:
memory when it remembers things, imagination when it alters or imitates them
and invention when it gives them a new turn or puts them into proper arrange-
ment and relationship. For these reasons the theological poets called Memory the
mother of the Muses.
X
820 The poets must therefore have been the first historians of the na-
tions. This is why Castelvetro failed to make use of his dictum for finding the
true origins of poetry; for he and all others who have discussed the matter (from
Plato and Aristotle on down) could easily have observed that all gentile histories
BOOK HI. DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER 281
have their beginnings in fables, as we set forth in the Axioms [202] and
demonstrated in the Poetic Wisdom.
XI
821 By the very nature of poetry it is impossible for anyone to be at the
same time a sublime poet and a sublime metaphysician, for metaphysics ab-
stracts the mind from the senses, and the poetic faculty must submerge the
whole mind in the senses; metaphysics soars up to universals, and the poetic
faculty must plunge deep into particulars.
XII
822 In virtue of the axiom set forth above [213] that he who has not
the natural gift may by industry succeed in every [other] capacity, but that in
poetry success by industry is completely denied to him who lacks the natural
gift the poetic and critical "arts" serve to make minds cultivated but not great.
For delicacy is a small virtue and greatness naturally disdains all small things.
Indeed, as a great rushing torrent cannot fail to carry turbid waters and roll
stones and trunks along in the violence of its course, so his very greatness ac-
counts for the low expressions we so often find in Homer.
XIII
823 But this does not make Homer any the less the father and prince of
all sublime poets.
XIV
824 For we have seen that Aristotle regarded the Homeric lies as with-
out equal, which is equivalent to Horace's opinion that his characters are inimi-
table,
XV
825 He is celestially sublime in his poetic sentences, which, as we have
shown in our Corollaries on the Heroic Nature in the second book, must be
conceived of true passions, or in virtue of a burning imagination must make
themselves truly felt by us, and they must therefore be individualized in those
who feel them. Hence maxims of life, as being general, were defined by us as
sentences of philosophers; and reflections on the passions themselves are the
work of false and frigid poets.
XVI
826 The poetic comparisons taken from wild and savage things, as we
observed above, are certainly incomparable in Homer.
282 THE NEW SCIENCE
XVII
827 The frightfulness of the Homeric battles and deaths, as we also
noted above, gives to the Iliad all its marvelousness.
XVIII
828 But these sentences, comparisons and descriptions, as we also proved
above, could not have been the natural product of a calm, cultivated and gentle
philosopher.
XIX
829 For in their customs the Homeric heroes are like boys in the fri-
volity of their minds, like women in the vigor of their imaginations and like
turbulent youths in the boiling fervor of their wrath, as was also shown above,
and therefore it is impossible that a philosopher should have conceived them
so naturally and felicitously.
XX
830 The ineptitudes and indecencies, as we have already proved, are
effects of the awkwardness with which the Greek peoples had labored to express
themselves in the extreme poverty of their language in its formative period.
XXI
831 And even if the Homeric poems contained the most sublime mys-
teries of esoteric wisdom, as we have shown in the Poetic Wisdom that they
certainly do not, the form in which they are expressed could not have been
conceived by a straightforward, orderly and serious mind such as befits a
philosopher.
XXII
832 The heroic language, as we have seen above in the Origins of Lan-
guages in the second book, was a language of similes, images and comparisons,
born of the lack of genera and species, which are necessary for the proper
definition of things, and hence born of a necessity of nature common to all
peoples.
XXIII
833 It was by a necessity of nature, as we also said in the second book,
that the first nations spoke in heroic verse. Here too we must admire the provi-
dence which, in the time when the characters of common script were not yet
invented, ordained that the nations should speak in verses so that their memories
might be aided by meter and rhythm to preserve more easily the histories of their
families and cities.
BOOK III. DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER 283
XXIV
834 These fables, sentences and customs, this language and verse, were
all called heroic, and were current in the times to which history has assigned
the heroes, as has been fully shown above in the Poetic Wisdom.
XXV
835 Hence all the aforesaid were properties of entire peoples and con-
sequently common to all the individual men of these peoples.
XXVI
836 In virtue, however, of the very nature from which sprang all the
aforesaid properties, which made Homer the greatest of poets, we denied that
he was ever a philosopher.
XXVII
837 Further we showed above in the Poetic Wisdom that the meanings
of esoteric wisdom were intruded into the Homeric fables by the philosophers
who came later.
XXVIII
838 But, as esoteric wisdom appertains to but few individual men, so
we have just seen that the very decorum of the heroic poetic characters, in which
consists all the essence of the heroic fables, cannot be achieved today by men
most learned in philosophy, in the art of poetry and in the art of criticism. It is
for this decorum that Aristotle and Horace give the palm to Homer, the former
saying that his lies are beyond equal and the latter that his characters are inimi-
table, which comes to the same thing.
[CHAPTER VI]
PHILOLOGICAL PROOFS FOR THE DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER
839 With this great number of philosophical proofs, resulting in large
part from the metaphysical criticism of the founders of the gentile nations,
among whom we must number Homer since certainly we have no more ancient
profane writer than he (as Josephus the Jew stoutly maintains), we may conjoin
the following philological proofs.
I
840 All ancient profane histories have fabulous beginnings.
284 THE NEW SCIENCE
II
841 Barbarous peoples, cut off from all the other nations of the world,
as were the Germans and the American Indians, have been found to preserve in
verses the beginnings of their history, as we have seen above.
Ill
842 It was the poets who began to write Roman history.
IV
843 In the returned barbarian times, the histories were written by the
poets who wrote in Latin.
V
844 Manetho, high priest of the Egyptians, interpreted the ancient his-
tory of Egypt, written in hieroglyphics, as a sublime natural theology.
VI
845 In the Poetic Wisdom we showed that the Greek philosophers did
the same with the early history of Greece recounted in fables.
VII
846 Wherefore above in the Poetic Wisdom we were obliged to reverse
the path of Manetho and, taking our point of departure from the mystical inter-
pretations, to restore to the fables their original historical meanings; and the
naturalness and ease, free of violence, subterfuge or distortion, with which we
were able to do so, show that the historical allegories which they contained were
proper to them.
VIII
847 All of which strongly confirms the assertion of Strabo, in a golden
passage, that before Herodotus, or rather before Hecataeus of Miletus, the his-
tory of the peoples of Greece was all written by their poets.
IX
848 And in the second book we showed that the first writers of both
ancient and modern nations were poets.
X
849 There are two golden passages in the Odyssey in which it is said, in
praise of a speaker who has told a story well, that he has told it like a musician
or singer. Just such indeed were the Homeric rhapsodes, who were vulgar men,
each preserving by memory some part of the Homeric poems.
BOOK III. DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER 285
XI
850 Homer left none of his poems in writing, according to the firm as-
sertion of Flavius Josephus the Jew against Apion the Greek grammarian, which
we have several times cited.
XII
851 The rhapsodes went about the cities of Greece singing the books of
Homer at the fairs and festivals, one singing one of them, another another.
XIII
852 By the etymology of their name from the two words which compose
it, rhapsodes were stitchers together of songs, and these songs they must cer-
tainly have collected from none other than their own peoples. Similarly [the
common noun] homeros is said to come from homou, "together," and eirein,
"to link"; thus signifying a guarantor, as being one who binds creditor and
debtor together. This derivation is as far-fetched and forced [when applied to a
guarantor] as it is natural and proper when applied to our Homer as a tier or
putter together of fables.
XIV
853 The Pisistratids, tyrants of Athens, divided and arranged the poems
of Homer, or had them divided and arranged, into [two groups,] the Iliad and
Odyssey. Hence we may understand what a confused mass of material they
must have been before, when the difference we can observe between the styles
of the two poems is infinite.
XV
854 The Pisistratids also ordered that from that time on the poems should
be sung by the rhapsodes at the Panathcnaic festivals, as Cicero writes in his
On the Nature of the Gods, and Aelian also, who is followed on this point by
[his editor] Scheffer.
XVI
855 But the Pisistratids were expelled from Athens only a few years be-
fore the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome. So, if we assume that Homer
lived at the time of Numa, as we have proved above, a long time must still have
ensued after the Pisistratids during which the rhapsodes continued to preserve
his poems by memory. This tradition takes away all credit from the other ac-
cording to which it was at the time of the Pisistratids that Aristarchus purged,
divided and arranged the poems of Homer, for that could not have been done
without vulgar writing, and so from then on there would have been no need
of rhapsodes to sing the several parts of them from memory.
286 THE NEW SCIENCE
XVII
856 By this reasoning, Hesiod, who left his works in writing, would have
to be placed after the Pisistratids, since we have no authority for supposing that
he was preserved by the memory of the rhapsodes as Homer was, though the
vain diligence of the chronologists has placed him thirty years before Homer.
Like the Homeric rhapsodes, however, were the cyclic poets, who preserved all
the fabulous history of Greece from the origins of their gods down to the return
of Ulysses to Ithaca. These cyclic poets, so called from fytyos, "circle," could
have been no other than simple men who would sing the fables to the common
people gathered in a circle around them on festive days. The circle is precisely
the one alluded to by Horace in his Art of Poetry in the phrase vilem patulumquc
orbem, "the base and large circle," concerning which Dacier is not at all satisfied
with the commentators who assert that Horace here means long episodes or di-
gressions. And perhaps the reason for his dissatisfaction is this: that it is not neces-
sary that an episode in a plot be base simply because it is long. To cite examples,
the episode of the joys of Rinaldo and Armida in the enchanted garden, and
that of the conversation of the old shepherd with Erminia, are indeed long but
are not therefore base; for the former is ornate and the latter tenuous and delicate,
and both are noble. But in this passage Horace, having advised the tragic poets
to take their arguments from the poems of Homer, runs into the difficulty that
in that case they would not be [creative] poets, since their plots would be those
invented by Homer. So Horace answers them that the epic stories of Homer
will become tragic plots of their own if they will bear three things in mind.
The first is to refrain from making idle paraphrases, in the way we still see men
read the Orlando jurioso or the [Orlando] tnnamorato or some other rhymed
romance to the "base and large circles" of idle people on feast days, and, after
reciting each stanza, explain it to them in prose with more words. The second is
not to be faithful translators. The third and last is not to be servile imitators, but,
adhering to the characters that Homer attributes to his heroes, to bring forth
from them new sentiments, speeches and actions in conformity with them; thus
on the same subjects they will be new poets in the style of Homer. So, in the same
work, Horace speaks of a "cyclical poet" as a trivial market-place poet. Authors
of this sort are ordinarily called tyklioi and entytyoi, and their collective work
was called tytyos epifys, kytyia cpe, poiema entytyifon, and sometimes {ytyos
without qualification, as Gerard Langbaine observes in his preface to Dionysius
Longinus. So in this way it may be that Hesiod, who contains all the fables of
the gods, is earlier than Homer.
XVIII
857 For this reason the same may be said of Hippocrates, who left many
great works, written not indeed in verse but in prose, so that they naturally
BOOK III. DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER 287
could not have been preserved by memory; whence he is to be assigned to about
the time of Herodotus.
XIX
858 From all this [it is evident that] Vossius placed an excess of good
faith in the three heroic inscriptions with which he thought he could confute
Josephus. For these inscriptions, the first of Amphitryon, the second of Hip-
pocoon, and the third of Laomedon [i.e. Laodamas], are impostures similar to
those still committed by falsifiers of medals. Martin Schoock supports Josephus
against Vossius.
XX
859 We may add that Homer never mentions vulgar Greek letters, and
the epistle written by Proetus to Eureia as a trap for Bellerophon is said by
Homer to have been written in semata, as we noted above.
XXI
860 Though Aristarchus emended Homer's poems, they still retain a
great variety of dialects and many improprieties of speech, which must have
been idiomatic expressions of various peoples of Greece, and many licenses in
meter besides.
XXII
861 The fatherland of Homer is not known, as we observed above.
XXIII
862 Almost all the cities of Greece laid claim to him, as has also been
noted above.
XXIV
863 Above we have brought forward strong conjectures that the Homer
of the Odyssey was from the west of Greece and toward the south, and that the
Homer of the Iliad was from the east and toward the north.
XXV
864 Not even Homer's age is known.
XXVI
865 The opinions on this point are so numerous and so varied that the
divergence extends to 460 years, the extreme estimates putting it as early as the
Trojan war and as late as the time of Numa.
288 THE NEW SCIENCE
XXVII
866 Dionysius Longinus, being unable to ignore the great diversity in
the styles of the two poems, says that Homer composed the Iliad in his youth
and the Odyssey in his old age: a strange detail to be known about a man of
whom we do not know the two most important historical facts, namely when
and where he lived, regarding which Longinus has left us in the dark in his
discussion of the greatest luminary of Greece.
XXVIII
867 This consideration should destroy all faith in Herodotus or whoever
was the author of the Life of Homer, in which so many delightful minor details
are narrated as to fill an entire volume, and all trust as well in the Ltfe of him
written by Plutarch, who, being a philosopher, spoke of him with greater
sobriety.
XXIX
868 But perhaps Longinus based his conjecture on the fact that in the
Iliad Homer depicts the wrath and pride of Achilles, which are properties of
youth, while in the Odyssey he relates the wiles and stratagems of Ulysses,
which are characteristic of the aged.
XXX
869 Tradition says that Homer was blind and that from his blindness he
took his name, which in the Ionic dialect means blind.
XXXI
870 Homer himself describes as blind the poets who sing at the banquets
of the great, such as the one who sings at the banquet of Alcinous for Ulysses,
and the one who sings at the feast of the suitors.
XXXII
871 It is a property of human nature that the blind have marvelously
retentive memories.
XXXIII
872 And finally [tradition says] that he was poor and wandered through
the market places of Greece singing his own poems.
[SECTION II]
DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER
[INTRODUCTION]
873 Now all these things reasoned out by us or related by others con-
cerning Homer and his poems, without our having intentionally aimed at any
such result indeed it had not even entered into our reflections when readers of
the first edition of this New Science (which was not worked out on the same
method as the present), men of acute minds and excelling in scholarship and
learning, suspected that the Homer believed in up to now was not real all
these things, I say, now compel us to affirm that the same thing has happened
in the case of Homer as in that of the Trojan war, of which the most judicious
critics hold that though it marks a famous epoch in history it never in the world
took place. And certainly if, as in the case of the Trojan war, there did not remain
of Homer certain great vestiges in the form of his poems, the great difficulties
would lead us to conclude that he was a purely ideal poet who never existed as
a particular man in the world of nature. But the many great difficulties on
the one hand, taken together with the surviving poems on the other, seem to
force us to take the middle ground that Homer was an idea or a heroic char-
acter of Grecian men insofar as they told their history in song.
[CHAPTER Ij
THE IMPROPRIETIES AND IMPROBABILITIES OF THE HOMER
HITHERTO BELIEVED IN BECOME PROPER AND NECESSARY
IN THE HOMER HEREIN DISCOVERED
874 In the light of this discovery, all the things in the speeches and in the
narrative which are improprieties and improbabilities in the Homer hitherto
290 THE NEW SCIENCE
believed in become proper and necessary in the Homer herein discovered. And
first of all, those most important matters concerning Homer on which we are
left in uncertainty compel us to say:
I
875 That the reason why the Greek peoples so vied with each other for
the honor of being his fatherland, and why almost all claimed him as citizen,
is that the Greek peoples were themselves Homer.
II
876 That the reason why opinions as to his age vary so much is that
our Homer truly lived on the lips and in the memories of the peoples of Greece
throughout the whole period from the Trojan war down to the time of Numa,
a span of 460 years.
Ill
877 And the blindness
IV
878 and the poverty of Homer were characteristics of the rhapsodes, who,
being blind, whence each of them was called homer os, had exceptionally re-
tentive memories, and, being poor, sustained life by singing the poems of Homer
throughout the cities of Greece; and they were the authors of these poems inas-
much as they were a part of these peoples who had composed their histories in
the poems.
879 Thus Homer composed the Iliad in his youth, that is when Greece
was young and consequendy seething with sublime passions, such as pride,
wrath and lust for vengeance, passions which do not tolerate dissimulation but
which love magnanimity; and hence this Greece admired Achilles, the hero of
violence. But he wrote the Odyssey in his old age, that is when the spirits of
Greece had been somewhat cooled by reflection, which is the mother of prudence,
so that it admired Ulysses, the hero of wisdom. Thus in the time of Homer's
youth the peoples of Greece found pleasure in coarseness, villainy, ferocity,
savagery and cruelty, while in the time of his old age they found delight in the
luxury of Alcinous, the joys of Calypso, the pleasures of Circe, the songs of the
Sirens, the pastimes of the suitors, and the attempts, nay the siege and the as-
saults on the chastity of Penelope: two sets of customs which, conceived above as
existing at the same time, seemed to us incompatible. This difficulty was enough
to cause the divine Plato to declare, in order to solve it, that Homer had fore-
seen by inspiration these nauseating, morbid and dissolute customs. Yet in this
way he merely made of Homer a stupid organizer of Greek civilization, for,
BOOK III. DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER 291
however much he may condemn, he nevertheless teaches these corrupt and
decadent customs which were to come long after the nations of Greece had been
organized, to the end that, by an acceleration of the natural course of human
affairs, the Greeks might hasten on toward corruption.
VI
880 In this fashion we show that the Homer who was the author of the
Iliad preceded by many centuries the Homer who was the author of the Odyssey.
VII
881 And we show that it was from the northeastern part of Greece that
the Homer came who sang of the Trojan war, which took place in his country,
and that it was from the southwestern part of Greece that the Homer came who
sang of Ulysses, whose kingdom was in that region.
VIII
882 Thus Homer, lost in the crowd of the Greek peoples, is justified
against all the accusations leveled at him by the critics, and particularly [against
those made] on account of his
IX
883 base sentences,
x
884 vulgar customs,
XI
885 crude comparisons,
XII
886 local idioms,
XIII
887 licenses in meter,
XIV
888 variations in dialect,
XV
889 and his having made men of gods and gods of men.
890 These last-mentioned fables Dionysius Longinus does not trust him-
self to sustain save by the props of philosophical allegories, which amounts to
admitting that, as they sounded when sung to the Greeks, they cannot have
brought Homer the glory of having been the organizer of Greek civilization.
292 THE NEW SCIENCE
The same difficulty recurs in Homer's case which, above in the Notes on the
Chronological Table, we raised against Orpheus as the founder of Greek hu-
manity. But the aforesaid properties and particularly the last all appertained
to the Greek peoples themselves. For inasmuch as at their founding they were
themselves pious, religious, chaste, strong, just and magnanimous, they made
their gods so also, as our natural theogony has demonstrated above; then later,
in the long passage of the years, as the fables became obscure and customs de-
cayed, from their own character they judged the gods too to be dissolute, as we
have set forth at length in the Poetic Wisdom. This in virtue of the axiom laid
down above [220], that men naturally bend obscure or dubious laws to their own
passions and utilities. For they feared that the gods would not be agreeable
to their desires if they were not like them in customs, as we have already
said.
XVI
891 But more than ever to Homer belong by right the two great pre-
eminences which are really one: that poetic falsehoods, as Aristotle says, and
heroic characters, as Horace says, could be created only by him. On this account
Horace avows himself to be no poet because he lacks the knack or the wit to
maintain what he calls the colors of works, colores operum, which means the
same thing as the poetic untruths of Aristotle's phrase, for in Plautus we find
obtinere colorem in the sense of telling a lie that under every aspect has the
appearance of truth, which is what a good fable must be.
892 In addition to these, all those other preeminences fall to him which
have been ascribed to him by all the masters of the art of poetry, declaring him
incomparable
xvn
893 in his wild and savage comparisons,
XVIII
894 in his cruel and fearful descriptions of battles and deaths,
XIX
895 in his sentences filled with sublime passions,
XX
896 in the clarity and splendor of his style. All these were properties of
the heroic age of the Greeks, in which and throughout which Homer was an
incomparable poet, just because, in the age of vigorous memory, robust imagina-
tion and sublime invention, he was in no sense a philosopher.
BOOK III. DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER 293
XXI
897 Wherefore neither philosophies, arts of poetry, nor arts of criticism,
which came later, could create a poet who could come anywhere near to rivaling
Homer.
898 And, what is more, his title is assured to the three immortal eulogies
that are given him:
XXII
899 first, of having been the organizer of Greek polity or civilization;
XXIII
900 second, of having been the father of all other poets;
XXIV
901 and third, of having been the source of all Greek philosophies. None
of these eulogies could have been given to the Homer hitherto believed in. Not
the first, for, counting from the time of Deucalion and Pyrrha, Homer comes
eighteen hundred years after the institution of marriage had laid the first founda-
tions of Greek civil life, as we have shown throughout the Poetic Wisdom. Not
the second, for it was certainly before Homer's time that the theological poets
flourished, such as Orpheus, Amphion, Linus, Musaeus and others, among
whom the chronologists have placed Hesiod, putting him three hundred years
before Homer. And Cicero affirms in his Brutus that there were other heroic
poets before Homer, whom Eusebius mentions by name in his Praeparatio
evangelica, such as Philammon, Thamyris, Demodocus, Epimenides, Aristaeus
and others. And, finally, not the third, for, as we have shown fully and at
length in the Poetic Wisdom, the philosophers did not discover their philosophies
in the Homeric fables but rather inserted them therein. But it was poetic wisdom
itself whose fables provided occasions for the philosophers to meditate their
lofty truths, and supplied them also with means for expounding them, as we
showed throughout the second book in fulfilment of die promise made at its be-
ginning.
[CHAPTER II]
THE POEMS OF HOMER REVEALED AS TWO GREAT TREASURE
STORES OF THE NATURAL LAW OF THE NATIONS OF GREECE
902 But above all, in virtue of our discovery we may ascribe to him an
additional and most dazzling glory:
294 THE NEW SCIENCE
XXV
903 that of having been the first historian of the entire gentile world who
has come down to us.
XXVI
904 Wherefore his poems should henceforth be highly prized as being
two great treasure stores of the customs of early Greece. But the same fate has
befallen the poems of Homer as the Law of the Twelve Tables; for, just as the
latter, having been held to be the laws given by Solon to the Athenians and sub-
sequently taken over by the Romans, has up to now concealed from us the his-
tory of the natural law of the heroic nations of Latium, so the Homeric poems,
having been regarded as works produced by a single supreme poet, have hitherto
concealed from us the history of the natural law of the nations of Greece.
[APPENDIX]
RATIONAL HISTORY OF THE DRAMATIC AND LYRIC POETS
905 We have already shown above that there were three ages of poets
before Homer. The first was the age of the theological poets, who were them-
selves heroes and sang true and austere fables; the second, that of the heroic
poets who altered and corrupted the fables; and the third that of Homer, who
received them in their altered and corrupted form. Now the same metaphysical
criticism of the history of the obscurest antiquity, that is, the explanation of the
ideas the earliest nations naturally formed, can illuminate and distinguish for
us the history of the dramatic and lyric poets, on which the philosophers have
written only in an obscure and confused fashion.
906 The philosophers class among the lyric poets Amphion [i.e. Arion]
of Methymna, a most ancient poet of heroic times, and affirm that he discovered
the dithyramb and therewith the chorus, and that he introduced the singing of
verses by satyrs, and that the dithyramb was a chorus led about singing verses in
praise of Bacchus. They say that noteworthy tragic poets flourished within the
period of the lyric; and Diogenes Laertius affirms that the first tragedy was
represented by the chorus alone. They say that Aeschylus was the first tragic
poet, and Pausanias relates that he was commanded by Bacchus to write tragedies
(although Horace says that Thespis was their originator, in that passage of his
Art of Poetry where he begins his treatment of tragedy with satire, and that
Thespis introduced satire [i.e. the satyr play] on carts at vintage time). Later,
they say, came Sophocles, called by Palaemon the Homer of the tragic poets;
and the cycle was completed by Euripides, whom Aristotle calls tragi1(5taton, the
most tragic of them all. They say that in the same period came Aristophanes,
who invented the Old Comedy and opened the way for the New (which was
later traveled by Menander), with his play entitled The Clouds, which was the
ruin of Socrates. Then some of them put Hippocrates in the time of the tragic
poets, others in the lyric period. But Sophocles and Euripides lived somewhat
before the time of the Law of the Twelve Tables, and the lyric poets came even
later; which would seem to upset the chronology which puts Hippocrates in
the age of the Seven Sages of Greece.
296 THE NEW SCIENCE
907 To solve this difficulty we must declare that there were two kinds
of tragic poets and two kinds of lyric poets.
908 The ancient lyric poets must in the first place have been the authors
of hymns in honor of the gods, like those attributed to Homer, composed in
heroic verse. They must later have been the poets of that lyric vein in which
Achilles sings to his lyre the praises of the heroes who have gone before.
Similarly among the Latins the first poets were the authors of the Salian verses,
which were hymns sung by the priests called Salii on the festival days of the gods.
(The priests were perhaps so called from satio, "to leap," even as the first Greek
choruses danced in a circle.) The fragments of these verses are the most ancient
memorials of the Latin language that have come down to us, and they have
something of the feeling of heroic verse, as we have already observed. All of
which is in accord with the beginnings of the humanity of the nations, which
in the first or religious period must have offered praise only to the gods (even
as in the returned barbarian times this religious custom returned, and the priests,
the only literate men of the time, composed only sacred hymns) ; whereas later,
in the heroic period, they must have admired and celebrated only the great deeds
of heroes, such as those sung by Achilles. It is to this kind of sacred lyric poets
that Amphion [i.e. Arion] of Methymna must have belonged. He was also the
originator of the dithyramb, which was the first rough beginning of tragedy,
composed in heroic vesse (the first kind of verse in which the Greeks sang, as
shown above). Thus the dithyramb of Amphion was the first satire, and it is
with satire that Horace begins his discussion of tragedy.
909 The new lyric poets were the melic poets, whose prince is Pindar,
and who wrote in verse what we in Italian call aric per musica. This sort of
verse must have come later than the iambic, which in turn, as we have shown
above, was the kind of verse in which the Greeks commonly spoke after the
heroic verse. Thus Pindar came in the times of the pompous bravery of Greece
admired at the Olympic games, at which these lyric poets sang. In the same way
Horace came in the most sumptuous times of Rome, under the reign of Augustus;
and among the Italians the melic period came in the times of the greatest soft-
ness and tenderness. '
910 The tragic and comic poets ran their course between the following
limits. Thespis in one part of Greece and Amphion [i.e Arion] in another
originated at vintage time the satire or satyr play, the primitive form of tragedy,
with satyrs for its characters. In the rough and simple fashion of those days they
must have invented the first mask by covering their feet, legs and thighs with
goat skins which they must have had at hand, and painting their breasts and
faces with the lees of wine and fitting their foreheads with horns (on which
account perhaps in our own day the vintagers are still vulgarly called "horned,"
cornuti). In this sense it may well be true that Bacchus, god of the vintage, com-
manded Aeschylus to compose tragedies. All of which accords well with the
times wher% the heroes were asserting that the plebeians were monsters of two
BOOK III. DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER 297
natures, half man, half goat, as we have fully set forth above. Thus there is strong
ground for conjecture that tragedy had its beginnings in this chorus of satyrs and
that it took its name from the primitive mask we have described, rather than
from the award of a tragos or goat to the winner in a competition in this sort
of verse. (Horace glances at this latter possibility without making anything
of it, and calls the goat paltry.) And the satire preserved this eternal property
with which it was born: that of expressing invective and insult; for the peasants,
thus roughly masked and riding in the carts in which they carried the grapes,
had the license as the vintagers still have in our happy Campania (once called
the dwelling of Bacchus) of hurling abuse at their betters. Hence we may
understand with how little truth the learned later inserted into the fable of Pan
(for fan signifies "all") the philosophical mythology to the effect that he signi-
fies the universe, and that the hairy nether parts mean the earth, the red breast
and face the element of fire and the horns the sun and the moon. The Romans,
however, preserved for us the historical mythology concerning him in the word
satyra, which, according to Festus, was a dish made of various kinds of foods.
Hence the later expression lex per satyram for an omnibus law. So, in dramatic
satire, which we are discussing here, according to Horace (for no examples of
this form have come down to us either from the Greeks or from the Latins)
various types of characters made their appearance, such as gods, heroes, kings,
artisans and slaves. But the satire that survived among the Romans does not
treat of varied matters, since each poem is devoted to a separate argument.
911 Then Aeschylus brought about the transition from the Old Tragedy,
that is the satyr play, to Middle Tragedy by using human masks and by con-
verting the dithyramb of Amphion, which was a chorus of satyrs, into a chorus
of men. And Middle Tragedy must have been the origin of Old Comedy, in
which great personages were portrayed and the chorus was therefore fitting.
Afterwards came first Sophocles and then Euripides, who left us the final form
of tragedy. The Old Comedy ended with Aristophanes, because of the scandal
about Socrates; and Menander bequeathed us the New Comedy, built around
private and fictitious personages, who could be fictitious because they were
private, and could therefore be believed to be real, as we have explained above.
Hence there was no longer any room for the chorus, which is a public that
comments and comments only on public matters.
912 In this way the satire was composed in heroic verse, as the Latins
afterwards preserved it, because the first peoples spoke in heroic verse. Later
they spoke in iambic verse, so that tragedy was composed in iambic verse quite
naturally, and comedy only by an empty adherence to precedent when the Greek
peoples were already speaking in prose. The iambic meter was certainly appro-
priate to tragedy, for it is a verse born to give vent to anger, and its movement is
that of what Horace calls a swift foot (as noted in an axiom [233]). Vulgar
tradition says that it was invented by Archilochus to vent his wrath against
Lycambcs, who had refused to give him his daughter in marriage, and that the
298 THE NEW SCIENCE
bitterness of his verses drove father and daughter to hang themselves in despera-
tion. This must have been a history of the heroic contest over connubium, in
which the rebellious plebeians must have hanged the nobles along with their
daughters.
913 So was born that monstrosity of poetic art by which the same violent,
rapid and excited verse is made to fit such grand poetry as that of tragedy, con-
sidered by Plato even more lofty than the epic, and at the same time such delicate
poetry as that of comedy; and the same metric foot, well adapted, as we have
said, to express wrath and rage, in which tragedy must break forth so fearfully,
is considered equally good as a vehicle for jests, games and sentimental love
affairs, which must make up all the grace and charm of comedy.
914 As a result of the indiscriminate use of the terms lyric and tragic,
Hippocrates was placed in the time of the Seven Sages; but he should rather be
put about the time of Herodotus, since he came at a time when men still spoke
largely in fables (for his own life has a tinge of the fabulous, and Herodotus's
History is largely narrated in the form of fables), yet not only had speech in
prose been introduced but also writing in vulgar characters, in which Herodotus
wrote his history and Hippocrates wrote the many works on medicine that have
come down to us, as we have already said above.
BOOK FOUR
THE COURSE OF NATIONS
[INTRODUCTION]
915 In virtue of the principles of this Science established in the first
book, and of the origins of all the divine and human things of the gentile world
which we investigated and discovered in the second book, and of the discovery
in the third book that the poems of Homer are two great treasure stores of the
natural law of the nations of Greece (just as we had already found the Law
of the Twelve Tables to be a great monument of the natural law of the nations of
Latium), we shall now, by the aid of this philosophical and philological illumina-
tion, and relying on the Axioms above stated concerning the ideal eternal his-
tory [241-245], in this fourth book discuss the course the nations take, proceed-
ing in all their various and diverse customs with constant uniformity upon the
division of the three ages which the Egyptians said had elapsed before them in
their world, namely, the successive ages of gods, heroes and men. For the nations
will be seen to develop in conformity with this division by a constant and unin-
terrupted order of causes and effects present in every nation, through three kinds
of natures. From these natures arise three kinds of customs; and in virtue of
these customs three kinds of natural laws of nations are observed; and in con-
sequence of these laws three kinds of civil states or commonwealths are estab-
lished. And in order that men, having reached the stage of human society, may
on the one hand communicate to each other the aforesaid three most important
matters [customs, laws, commonwealths], three kinds of languages and as many
of characters are formed; and in order that they may on the other hand justify
them, three kinds of jurisprudence assisted by three kinds of authority and three
kinds of reason in as many of judgments. The three kinds of jurisprudence pre-
vail in three sects of times, which the nations profess in the course of their history.
These [groups of] three special unities, with many others that derive from them
and will also be enumerated in this book, all lead to one general unity. This is
the unity of the religion of a provident divinity, which is the unity of the spirit
informing and giving life to this world of nations. Having discussed these mat-
ters above in fragmentary fashion, we shall here exhibit the order of their de-
velopment.
[SECTION I]
THREE KINDS OF NATURES
916 The first nature, by an illusion of imagination, which is most robust
in those weakest in reasoning power, was a poetic or creative nature which we
may be allowed to call divine, as it ascribed to physical things the being of sub-
stances animated by gods, assigning the gods to them according to its idea of
each. This nature was that of the theological poets, who were the earliest wise
men in all the gentile nations, when all the gentile nations were founded on the
belief which each of them had in certain gods of its own. Furthermore it was a
nature all fierce and cruel; but, through that same error of their imagination,
men had a terrible fear of the gods whom they themselves had created. From
this period there remained two eternal properties: one, that religion is the only
means powerful enough to restrain the fierceness of peoples; and the other,
that religions prosper when those who preside over them are themselves in-
wardly reverent.
917 The second was the heroic nature, believed by the heroes them-
selves to be of divine origin; for, since they believed that the gods made every-
thing, they held themselves to be children of Jove, as having been generated under
his auspices. Being thus of the human [not a bestial] species, they regarded their
heroism as including the natural nobility in virtue of which they were the princes
of the human race. And this natural nobility they made their boast over those
who had fled from the infamous and bestial communism to save themselves
from the strife it entailed, and had taken refuge in their asylums; for, since they
had come thither without gods, the heroes regarded them as beasts. We have
discussed these two natures above.
918 The third was human nature, intelligent and hence modest, benign
and reasonable, recognizing for laws conscience, reason and duty.
[SECTION II]
THREE KINDS OF CUSTOMS
919 The first customs were all tinged with religion and piety, like those
of Deucalion and Pyrrha, fresh from the flood.
920 The second were choleric and punctilious, like those related of
Achilles.
921 The third are dutiful, taught by one's own sense of civil duty.
[SECTION III]
THREE KINDS OF NATURAL LAW
922 The first law was divine, for men believed themselves and all their
property to depend on the gods, since they thought everything was a god or was
made or done by a god.
923 The second was heroic law, the law of force, but controlled by re-
ligion, which alone can keep force within bounds where there are no human laws
or none strong enough to curb it. Hence providence ordained that the first
peoples, ferocious by nature, should be persuaded by this their religion to ac-
quiesce naturally in force, and that, being as yet incapable of reason, they should
measure right by fortune, with a view to which they took counsel by auspicial
divination. This law of force is the law of Achilles, who referred every right to
the tip of his spear.
924 The third is the human law dictated by fully developed human
reason.
[SECTION IV]
THREE KINDS OF GOVERNMENTS
925 The first were divine, or, as the Greeks would say, theocratic, in
which men believed that everything was commanded by the gods. This was the
age of oracles, which are the earliest thing we read of in history*
926 The second were heroic or aristocratic governments, which is as
much as to say governments of the optimates in the sense of the most powerful* In
Greek they were called governments of Heraclids (men sprung from the race of
Hercules), in the sense of nobles; these were scattered throughout early Greece,
and survived at Sparta. They were also called governments of Curetes, which the
Greeks found scattered in Saturma (ancient Italy), Crete and Asia; and hence
governments of Quintes among the Romans, that is of armed priests in public
assembly. In governments of this kind, in virtue of the distinction of a nobler
nature ascribed to divine origin, as we have noted above, all civil rights were
confined to the ruling orders of the heroes themselves, and the plebeians, being
considered of bestial origin, were only permitted to enjoy life and natural liberty.
927 The third are human governments, in which, in virtue of the
equality of the intelligent nature which is the proper nature of man, all are
accounted equal under the laws, inasmuch as all are born free in their cities.
This is the case in the free popular cities in which all or the majority make up
the just forces of the city, in virtue of which they are the lords of popular
liberty. It is also the case in monarchies, in which the monarchs make all their
subjects equal under their laws, and, having all the force of arms in their own
hands, are themselves the only bearers of any distinction in civil nature.
[SECTION V]
THREE KINDS OF LANGUAGES
928 Three kinds of languages.
929 The first of these was a divine mental language by mute religious
acts or divine ceremonies, from which there survived in Roman civil law the
actus legitimi which accompanied all their civil transactions. This language
belongs to religions by the eternal property that it concerns them more to be
reverenced than to be reasoned, and it was necessary in the earliest times when
men did not yet possess articulate speech.
930 Th second was by heroic blazonings, with which arms are made to
speak; this kind of speech, as we have said above, survived in military discipline.
931 The trnrd is by articulate speech, which is used by all nations today.
[SECTION VI]
THREE KINDS OF CHARACTERS
932 Three kinds of characters,
933 The first were divine, properly called hieroglyphics, used, as we have
shown above, by all nations in their beginnings. And they were certain imagina-
tive universals, dictated naturally by the human mind's innate property of de-
lighting in the uniform (on which we set forth an axiom [204]). When they
could not achieve this by logical abstraction, they did it by imaginative represen-
tation. To these poetic universals they reduced all the particular species belonging
to each genus, as to Jove everything concerning the auspices, to Juno everything
touching marriage, and so on.
934 The second were heroic characters, which were also imaginative
universals to which they reduced the various species of heroic things, as to
Achilles all the deeds of valiant fighters and to Ulysses all the devices of clever
men. These imaginative genera, as the human mind later learned to abstract
forms and properties from subjects, passed over into intelligible genera, which
prepared the way for the philosophers, from whom the authors of the New
Comedy, which came in the most civilized times of Greece, took the intelligible
genera of human customs and portrayed them in their comedies.
935 Finally, there were invented the vulgar characters which went along
with the vulgar languages. The latter are composed of words, which are genera
as it were of the particulars previously employed by the heroic languages; as, to
repeat an example cited above, from the heroic phrase "the blood boils in my
heart" they made the word "I am angry/' In like fashion, of a hundred and
twenty thousand hieroglyphic characters (the number still used, for example, by
the Chinese) they made a few letters, to which, as to genera, they reduced the
hundred and twenty thousand words (of which the Chinese vulgar spoken
language is composed). This invention certainly is the work of a mind more
than human; whence, as we learned above, Bernard von Mallinckrodt and
Ingewald El ing held it to be a divine invention. It is easy to understand how
the common sense of marvel led the nations to believe that men eminent in
divinity had invented these letters, as St. Jerome among the Illyrians, St. Cyril
308 THE NEW SCIENCE
among the Slavs, and so on, as Angelo Roccha observes in his Bibliothcca
Vaticana, where the authors of what we call vulgar letters are depicted along
with their alphabets. But such an opinion can be convicted of manifest falsity if
we pose the simple question: Why did they not teach letters of their own crea-
tion? We have raised this difficulty in the case of Cadmus above, who brought
letters from Phoenicia to the Greeks, and the latter afterwards used letters of
very different forms from the Phoenician.
936 Above we affirmed that such languages and letters were under the
sovereignty of the vulgar of the various peoples, whence both are called vulgar.
In virtue of this sovereignty over languages and letters, the free peoples must
also be masters of their laws, for they impose on the laws the senses in which
they constrain the powerful to observe them, even against their will, as we
noted in the Axioms [283], It is naturally not in the power of monarchs to de-
prive the people of this sovereignty, but, in virtue of this very inalienable nature
of human civil affairs, such sovereignty, inseparable from the people, contributes
largely to the power of the monarchs, for they may issue their royal laws, which
the nobles must accept, according to the senses that their peoples give to them.
This sovereignty over vulgar letters and languages implies that, in the order
of civil nature, the free popular commonwealths preceded the monarchies.
[SECTION VII]
THREE KINDS OF JURISPRUDENCE
937 Three kinds of jurisprudence or [legal] wisdom.
938 The first was a divine wisdom, called, as we have seen, mystic
theology, which means the science of divine speech or the understanding of the
divine mysteries of divination. This science of auspicial divinity was the vulgar
wisdom whose sages were the theological poets, who were the first sages of the
gentile world. From this mystic theology they were called mystai or mystics,
which the well-informed Horace translates as interpreters of the gods. To this
first jurisprudence therefore belonged the first and proper interpreting, called
interpretari for interpatrari, that is, "to enter into the fathers," as the gods were
at first called as we observed above. Dante would call it indtarsi, "to enter into
the mind of God." This sort of jurisprudence measured justice only by the
solemnity of the divine ceremonies, whence the Romans preserved such a super-
stitious regard for the actus Icgitimi and they retained in their language the
phrases iustae nuptiae, iustum testamentum for solemnized nuptials and testa-
ments.
939 The second was the heroic jurisprudence, taking precautions by the
use of certain proper words. Such is the wisdom of Ulysses who speaks so
adroitly in Homer that he obtains the advantages he seeks while always observ-
ing the propriety of his words. Hence all the reputation of the ancient Roman
jurisconsults rested in their cavere, their taking care or making sure; and their
dc iure respondere was nothing but cautioning clients who had to present their
cases in court to set forth the facts to the praetor with such circumstances that
the formulae for action would be satisfied and the praetor would be unable to
withhold them. Similarly in the returned barbarian times all the reputation of the
doctors rested on finding safeguards for contracts and wills and on knowing
how to draw up pleas at law and articles; which correspond exactly to the
cavere and the de iure respondere of the Roman jurisconsults.
940 The third is human jurisprudence, which looks to the truth of the
facts themselves and benignly bends the rule of law to all the requirements of the
equity of the causes. This kind of jurisprudence is observed in the free popular
3io THE NEW SCIENCE
commonwealths and even more under the monarchies, which are both human
governments.
941 Thus divine and heroic jurisprudence laid hold of the certain when
the nations were rude, and human jurisprudence looked to the true when they
had become enlightened. All this in consequence of the definitions of the certain
and the true, and of the axioms set forth on the matter in our Elements [137,
138,321,324].
[SECTION VIII]
THREE KINDS OF AUTHORITY
942 There were three kinds of authority. The first is divine, and of this
we ask no accounting by providence. The second is heroic, resting entirely
on the solemn formulae of the laws. The third is human, based on the trust
placed in persons of experience, of singular prudence in practical matters, and
of sublime wisdom in intellectual matters.
943 These three kinds of authority employed by jurisprudence in the
course which the nations take, correspond to three sorts of authority appertain-
ing to senates, which succeed one another in the aforesaid course.
944 The first was the authority of property ownership, in virtue of which
those from whom we derive title to property were called auctores, and such own-
ership is itself always called auctoritas in the Law of the Twelve Tables. This
authority had its roots in divine governments from the time of the family state,
in which divine authority must have been vested in the gods, for it was be-
lieved, fairly enough, that everything belonged to the gods. Afterwards in the
heroic aristocracies in which the senates were the seat of sovereignty (as they are
in the aristocracies of our own time), authority quite properly was vested in these
reigning senates. Hence the heroic senates gave their approval to that which
the peoples had previously devised; as Livy puts it, eius, quod populus iusstsset,
deinde patres fierent auctores. This does not, however, date from the interregnum
of Romulus, as history relates, but from the declining period of the aristocracy
when citizenship had been extended to the plebs, as explained above. This ar-
rangement, as Livy himself says, saepe sfcctabat ad vim, frequently threatened
to issue in revolt; so that, if the people wanted their proposals confirmed, they
had, for example, to nominate for consuls those who were favored by the senate,
just as is the case when magistrates are nominated by the people under mon-
archies.
945 From the time of the law of Publilius Philo, which declared the
Roman people free and absolute sovereign of the empire, as stated above, the
authority of the senate was that of guardianship, just as the approval given by
guardians to the transactions of their wards, who are masters of their own
312 THE NEW SCIENCE
patrimonies, is called auctorltas tutorum. This [tutorial] authority was conferred
by the senate on the people in the formula of the law drafted beforehand in the
senate, by which, just as the authority of the guardian has to be conferred on the
ward, so the senate was to be present in the people, present in the great assem-
blies, present in the act of decreeing the law if they decided to decree it; otherwise
they might reject ("antiquate") it, frobaret antiqua, that is, declare that they
wished no change. All this in order that the people, in decreeing the laws, might
not, by reason of their weak counsel, do any harm to the commonwealth, and in
order that, in decreeing them, they might be regulated by the senate. Thus the
formulae of the laws brought by the senate to the people to be decreed by them
arc advisedly defined by Cicero as per scrip tae auctoritates: not personal authori-
zations, like that of guardians who by their presence approve the acts of their
wards, but authority set out at length in writing (for such is the sense of per-
scribere), as distinguished from the formulae of actions, written per notas or
employing abbreviations which are not understood by the people. This is what
was ordained by the Publilian law: that henceforth the authority of the senate, in
Livy's words, valeret in incertum cormtiorum eventum, should be committed
while the outcome in the assembly is as yet uncertain.
946 Finally the commonwealth passed from popular liberty to monarchy,
and there ensued the third kind of authority, which is that of credit or reputa-
tion for wisdom; and hence the authority of counsel, in respect of which the
jurisconsults under the emperors were said to be auctores. Such also must be the
authority of senates under monarchs, who have full and absolute liberty to fol-
low or not to follow the counsel their senates give them.
[SECTION IX]
THREE KINDS OF REASON
[CHAPTER I]
[DIVINE REASON AND REASON OF STATE]
947 There were three kinds of reason.
948 The first is divine and understood only by God; men know of it only
what has been revealed to them. To the Hebrews first and then to the Christians,
this has been by internal speech to their minds as the proper expression of a God
all mind; but [also] by external speech through the prophets and through Jesus
Christ to the apostles, by whom it was declared to the Church. To the gentiles
it has been through the auspices, the oracles and other corporeal signs regarded
as divine messages because they were supposed to come from the gods, whom the
gentiles believed to be corporeal. So that in God who is all reason, reason and
authority are the same thing; whence in good theology divine authority holds
the same place as reason. Here providence is to be admired because, in the earliest
times when the men of the gentile world did not understand reason (which must
have been the case above all in the family state), it permitted them to fall into
the error of following in place of reason the authority of the auspices, and to
govern themselves by what they believed to be the divine counsels thereby com-
municated. This by the eternal property that when men fail to see reason in
human affairs, and much more if they see it opposed, they take refuge in the
inscrutable counsels hidden in the abyss of divine providence.
949 The second was reason of state, called by the Romans civilis acquitas,
which Ulpian, as cited above in the Axioms [320], defined for us as not naturally
known to all men but only to the few experts in government who are able to
discern what is necessary for the preservation of mankind. In this the heroic
senates were naturally wise, and above them all the Roman senate was most
wise both in the times of aristocratic liberty, when the plebs was not permitted
to take part in public affairs, and in the times of popular liberty, so long as the
people were guided by the senate in public matters, which is to say down to the
times of the Gracchi.
314 THE NEW SCIENCE
[CHAPTER II]
COROLLARY ON THE POLITICAL WISDOM OF THE ANCIENT
ROMANS
950 Here arises a problem which seems very difficult to solve. How is it
that the Romans could have been so wise in statecraft in the rude times of Rome,
when in their enlightened times Ulpian says that "today only a few experts in
government understand statecraft"? The answer is that, by virtue of the same
natural causes which produced the heroism of the first peoples, the ancient Ro-
mans, who were the heroes of the world, naturally looked to civil equity, which
was most scrupulous about the words in which the laws were expressed. By this
superstitious observance of their words, they made the laws march straight
through all the facts, even where the laws turned out to be severe, harsh and cruel
(in accordance with what we have said above), just as reason of state operates to-
day. Thus civil equity naturally subordinated everything to that law, queen of all
others, conceived by Cicero with a gravity adequate to the matter: Suprema lex
populi salus est&r "Let the safety of the people be the supreme law/' For in
heroic times, in which the states were aristocratic, as we have fully shown above,
the heroes each possessed privately a large share of the public utility in the form
of the family monarchies preserved for them by the fatherland; and in view of
this great particular interest preserved for them by the commonwealth, they
naturally subordinated their minor private interests. Hence naturally as mag-
nanimous men they defended the public good, which is that of the state, and as
wise men they gave counsel on affairs of state. This was a high counsel of divine
providence, for the cyclopic fathers (such as we have found them in Homer and
Plato), if they had not had such a great private interest identified with that of
the state, could not have been induced to abandon their savage life in favor of
civilization, as we have already observed above.
951 It is quite otherwise in the human times in which free popular states
or monarchies develop. In the former the citizens have command of the public
wealth, which is divided among them in as many minute parts as there are
citizens making up the people who have command of it. In the second the sub-
jects are commanded to look after their own private interests and leave the care
of the public interest to the sovereign prince. To this we must add the natural
causes which produced these forms of state (which are quite opposite to those
which had produced heroism); namely, as we have shown above, love of ease,
tenderness toward children, love of women and desire for life. By reason of all
this, men are today naturally led to attend to the smallest details which may bring
BOOK IV. THE COURSE OF NATIONS 315
their private utilities into equality with those of others. This is the aequum
bonum considered by the third kind of reason to be discussed here, namely,
natural reason, which is called aequitas naturalis by the jurisconsults. This is the
only reason of which the multitude are capable, for, when they are themselves in-
volved, they attend to the smallest considerations of the justice which is called
for by cases when the facts are reduced to their individual species. And in mon-
archies there are needed a few men skilled in statecraft to give counsel according
to civil equity on public emergencies in the cabinets, and a great many jurists of
private jurisprudence to administer justice to the peoples by professing natural
equity.
[CHAPTER III]
COROLLARY: FUNDAMENTAL HISTORY OF ROMAN LAW
952 What has here been set forth concerning the three kinds of reason
may serve as a foundation on which to establish the history of Roman law. For
governments must conform to the nature of the governed, as we have laid down
above in an axiom [246]; inasmuch as the governments are born of the nature
of the governed, as has been shown above by our Principles. So too the laws must
be administered in conformity with the governments, and on that account must
be interpreted according to the form of the governments. (This seems not to have
been done by any of the jurisconsults or interpreters, who have fallen into the
same error into which the historians of Roman affairs had previously fallen. The
latter tell of laws decreed at various times in the Roman commonwealth but fail
to point out the relations which these laws must have had to the forms of govern-
ment through which that commonwealth passed. Hence the facts emerge so de-
nuded of the proper causes which must naturally have produced them, that
Jean Bodin, equally learned as jurist and as statesman, argues that the things
done by the ancient Romans in the period of the liberty which the historians
falsely describe as popular were instead the effects of an aristocratic common-
wealth, as in the present work we have shown to be the fact.) In view of all
this, if all the embellishers of the history of Roman law are asked: Why did the
old jurisprudence practice such rigors in applying the Law of the Twelve Tables?
Why did the middle jurisprudence, by the edicts of the praetors, begin to exercise
a benignity of reason while still respecting that Law? Why did the new juris-
prudence, without even a pretense of regard for that Law, adopt the generous
profession of natural equity? then, in order to give an explanation of some
kind, they put forward one which is very offensive to Roman generosity, for
they say that the rigors, the solemnities, the scruples, the verbal subtleties and
316 THE NEW SCIENCE
finally the secrecy of the laws themselves were impostures on the part of the
nobles in order to keep the laws in their own hands, for the reason that the
laws make up a great part of civil power.
953 Yet these practices were so far from being impostures that they were
customs born of their very natures, which through such customs produced such
states as naturally dictated such practices and no others. For in the time of the
extreme savagery of earliest mankind, when religion was the only means suf-
ficiently powerful to tame it, providence, as we have seen above, ordained that
men should live under divine governments and that the laws everywhere
reigning should be sacred, which is as much as to say mysterious and hidden
from the masses of the peoples. The laws in the state of the families were so
naturally of this sort that they were preserved in mute languages expressed in
consecrated solemnities (which survived in the actus legitimi), which those
simple minds held necessary to assure one man of the effective will of another
in the exchange of utilities, whereas now, in the natural intelligence of our
minds, it is sufficient to assure oneself by the spoken word or even by mere
gestures. Then came the human governments of aristocratic civil states, and,
naturally continuing to practice the religious customs, they religiously con-
tinued to keep the laws mysterious and secret (this secrecy being the soul and
life of aristocratic commonwealths), and religion insured the strict observance
of the laws which is the rigor of civil equity by which aristocracies are principally
preserved. Afterwards, when the time came for popular commonwealths, which
are naturally open, generous and magnanimous (being commanded by the
multitude, whom we have shown to be naturally intent on natural equity), the
so-called vulgar languages and letters (of which, as we said above, the multitude
are masters) developed at the same pace, and in these they ordered that the
laws be written down, and thus what had been secret came naturally to be
published. This is [the history of] the ius latens of which Pomponius relates
that the Roman plebs would have no more of it and hence insisted that the laws
be inscribed on tablets, since vulgar letters had come from the Greeks to Rome,
as noted above. This order of civil human things was finally found ready for the
monarchic states, in which the monarchs wish the laws administered according
to natural equity and consequently in harmony with the understanding of the
multitude, and thus make the powerful and the weak equal before the law,
which monarchy alone can do. And civil equity or reason of state was understood
by a few men wise in public reason, and, by virtue of its eternal property, is pre-
served secret within cabinets.
[SECTION X]
THREE KINDS OF JUDGMENTS
[CHAPTER I]
[FIRST KIND: DIVINE JUDGMENTS]
954 There were three kinds of judgments.
955 The first were divine judgments. In the so-called state of nature
(which was that of the families), as there were no civil authorities ruling by
law, the family fathers complained to the gods of the wrongs done them (which
was the first and proper meaning of the phrase implorare deorum fidem) and
called the gods to bear witness to the justice of their causes (the first and proper
meaning of deos obtestari). Such accusations and defenses were the world's
first orations, in the primary and proper sense of that word, and oratio continued
to be used in Latin for accusation or defense. There are fine examples of this usage
in Plautus and Terence, and the Law of the Twelve Tables preserved two golden
passages in which fur to or are and pacto or are (not adorare, which is Lipsius's
reading) are used respectively for agere and cxcipere, "to bring suit" and "to
enter an exception." From these orations the term oratorcs survived in Latin for
those who plead cases in court. The original appeals to the gods were made by
simple and rude people in the belief that they were heard by the gods whom they
imagined to dwell on the tops of the mountains, as Homer places them on
Olympus; and Tacitus tells of a war waged between the Hermunduri and the
Chatti under the superstition that, except from the mountain tops, mortal
prayers arc nowhere more closely listened to by the gods preces mortalium
nusquam propius audiri [than at the river between these two peoples],
956 The rights secured by these divine judgments were themselves gods,
for in those times the gentiles imagined that all things were gods. For example,
Lar was the ownership of the household; dii Hospitales, the right of shelter; dii
Penates, the paternal power; deus Genius, the right of marriage; deus Terminus,
the ownership of the farm; dii Manes, the right of burial. Of the last, a golden
vestige survived in the Law of the Twelve Tables: ius deorum manium*
3 i8 THE NEW SCIENCE
957 After such orations (or obsecrations or implorations) and after
such obtestations, they proceeded to the act of execrating the criminals. Hence
among the Greeks, as was certainly the case at Argos, there were temples of
execration, and the execrated men were called anathemata, or, as we say, excom-
municates. And against them they made vows (this was the first nuncupare
vota, which means to make solemn vows with consecrated formulae) and they
consecrated them to the Furies (who were truly dirts devoti) and then killed
them. (The custom of the Scythians, as we noted above, was to fix a knife in the
ground, adore it as a god and then kill the man with it.) This kind of execution
the Latins called mactare, which remained a sacred term used in sacrifices; this
is the source of the Spanish matar and the Italian ammazzare, to kill. We saw
above that among the Greeks ara remained in the senses of "harmful body,"
"vow," and "fury," and among the Latins it meant both "altar" and "victim."
Some kind of excommunication survived among all nations. Caesar left us a
detailed account of the Gallic ceremony, and the interdict of fire and water was
preserved among the Romans, as set forth above. Many of these consecrations
passed into the Law of the Twelve Tables; for example, he who violated a trib-
une of the plebs was "consecrated to Jove"; an impious son was "consecrated
to the gods of the fathers"; he who set fire to another's grain was "consecrated to
Ceres" and burned alive. Such must have been those whom Plautus called
Saturn's victims, Saturni hostiae. It may be seen that the cruelty of these divine
punishments was^ike that mentioned in the Axioms [190] as characteristic of
the crudest witches.
958 From the practice of these judgments in private affairs, the peoples
went forth to wage wars which were called pure and pious, pur a et pia bella, and
they waged them pro arts et jocis, "for altar and hearth"; that is, for civil con-
cerns both public and private, for they regarded ail human things as divine.
Hence the heroic wars were all wars of religion, and the heralds, in delivering a
declaration of war, called forth the gods from the enemy city, and consecrated
the enemy to the gods. Wherefore defeated kings were presented by the tri-
umphant Romans to Jove Feretrius on the Capitoline and thereafter slain, after
the pattern of the impious violent who had been the first hosts, the first victims,
which Vesta had consecrated on the first altars of the world. And the surrendered
peoples were considered men without gods, after the pattern of the first famuli;
whence slaves, like inanimate things, were called mancipia in the Roman
language, and in Roman jurisprudence they were held in loco rcrum.
BOOK IV. THE COURSE OF NATIONS 319
[CHAPTER II]
COROLLARY ON DUELS AND REPRISALS
959 One sort of divine judgments, in the barbarous period of the nations,
were duels, which must have begun under the earliest government of the gods
and continued for a long time under the heroic commonwealths. Concerning the
latter we cited in the Axioms [269] the golden passage in Aristotle's Politics
where he says that these commonwealths had no judiciary laws for punishing
private wrongs and making restitution for private injuries. Until now this has
not been believed, because of the false opinion hitherto held by the conceit of
scholars concerning the philosophic heroism of the first peoples which was sup-
posed to follow from the matchless wisdom of the ancients.
960 Certainly among the Romans the interdict Unde vi and the actions
DC vi bonorum raptorum and Quod metus caussa were introduced late and only
by the praetor, as we have already noted. And in the return of barbarism private
reprisals lasted down to the time of Bartolus. Such must have been the condic-
tions or personal actions of the ancient Romans, for condicere, according to
Festus, means to denounce or serve notice. (Thus a family father had to make
formal demand for restitution on one who had unjustly taken from him some-
thing that belonged to him, in order to proceed to reprisals.) Such a denunciation
remained a formality of personal actions, as Ulrich Zasius acutely discerned.
961 But duels contained real judgments, which, because they took place
re praesenti, had no need of the formal denunciation. From these developed the
vindiciae, in which a clod taken from the wrongful possessor with a feigned show
of force, which Aulus Gellius calls jestucaria, of straw (but the name vindiciae
must have come from the real force originally used), was taken to the judge,
before whom the claimant spoke over the gleba or clod the words: Aio hunc
jundum meum esse ex lure quiritium, "I declare this farm to be mine by the
law of the Quirites." Hence those who write that duels were introduced for lack
of proofs are wrong; they should say rather for lack of judiciary laws. For cer-
tainly Frotho, king of Denmark, ordered that all disputes should be settled by
duels, thereby forbidding their settlement by legitimate judgments. And, to
avoid litigation, the laws of the Lombards, Salians, Englishmen, Burgundians,
Normans, Danes and Germans are all alike full of duels. On this account Cujas
in his De jeudis says: Et hoc genere purgationis diu usi sunt christiani tarn in
civilibus quam in criminalibus caussis, re omni duello commissa: "Christians
made use of this sort of purgation for a long time in both civil and criminal
cases, everything being settled by duel." From this it came about that those who
320 THE NEW SCIENCE
are called Ritter or knights in Germany profess the science of dueling and oblige
the prospective adversaries to tell the truth; for duels, if witnesses were admitted
and consequently judges had to intervene, would come under either civil or
criminal judgments.
962 It has not been believed that the first barbarism practiced dueling,
because no record of it has come down to us. But it passes our understanding how
the Homeric Cyclopes, in whom Plato recognizes the earliest family fathers in
the state of nature, can have endured being wronged, to say nothing of showing
humanity in the matter. Certainly Aristotle, as cited in the Axioms [269], tells
us that in the earliest commonwealths, not to speak of the still earlier state of the
families, there were no laws to right wrongs and punish offenses suffered by
private citizens (as we have just proved was the case in the ancient Roman
commonwealth); and therefore Aristotle also tells us, as cited in the same place,
that this was the custom of barbarous peoples, for, as we noted in that connection,
peoples are barbarous in their beginnings because they are not yet chastened by
laws.
963 However, there are two great vestiges of such duels, one from Greek
and one from Roman history, showing that the peoples must have begun their
wars (called duella by the ancient Latins) with combats between the offended
individuals, even if they were kings, waged in the presence of their respective
peoples whom they wished publicly to defend or avenge their offenses. In this
fashion certainly the Trojan war began with the combat of Menelaus and Paris
(the former the wronged husband and the latter the seducer of his wife Helen);
and when the duel was indecisive the Greeks and Trojans proceeded to wage war
with each other. And we have already noted the same custom among the Latin
nations in the war between the Romans and the Albans, which was effectively
settled by the combat between the three Horatii and the three Curiatii, one of
whom must have abducted Horatia. In such armed judgments right was meas-
ured by the fortune of victory. This was a counsel of divine providence, to the
end that, among barbarous peoples with little capacity for reason and no under-
standing of justice, wars might not breed further wars, and that they might
thus have some notion of the justice or injustice of men from the favor or dis-
favor of the gods: even as the gentiles scorned the saintly Job when he had
fallen from his royal estate because God was against him. And on the same
principle in the returned barbarian times the barbarous custom was to cut off
the hand of the loser, however just his cause.
964 From this sort of custom observed by the peoples in private affairs,
there emerged what the moral theologians call the external justice of wars,
whereby the nations might rest in the certainty of their dominions. In this fashion
the auspices which had founded the monarchical paternal authority of the
fathers in the state of the families, and had prepared and preserved for them
their aristocratic reigns in the heroic cities, and which, when shared with the
BOOK IV. THE COURSE OF NATIONS 321
plcbs, produced the free popular commonwealths (as Roman history openly
relates), finally legitimized by the fortune of arms the conquests of the lucky
victors. All this can have no other source than the innate concept of providence
which all nations possess and to which they must bow when they see the just
afflicted and the wicked prospering, as we have said before in the Idea of the
Work.
[CHAPTER III]
[SECOND KIND: ORDINARY JUDGMENTS]
965 The second kind of judgments, because of their recent origin from
divine judgments, were all ordinary, observed with an extreme verbal scrupulous-
ness which must have carried over from the previous divine judgments the name
religio verborum, even as divine things are universally conceived in sacred
formulae which cannot be altered by as much as one little letter; whence it was
said of the ancient formulae for actions:; qui cadlt virgula, caussa cadit, "he who
drops a comma loses his case." This is the natural law of heroic nations, ob-
served naturally by ancient Roman jurisprudence; and it was the praetor's jari,
which was an unalterable utterance, from which the days on which he dispensed
justice were called dies fasti. This justice, because only the heroes shared in
it under the heroic aristocracies, must have been the fas deorum of the
times in which, as we have explained above, the heroes had taken to themselves
the name of gods; whence later the name Fatum was given to the ineluctable
order of causes producing the things of nature, as being the utterance of God.
Hence perhaps the Italian verb ordinare, as applied especially to laws, in the sense
of giving commands which must necessarily be carried out.
966 In virtue of this order (which in connection with judgments signi-
fies the solemn formula for an action), that had dictated the cruel and shameful
punishment against the illustrious defendant Horatius, the duumvirs them-
selves could not have absolved him even had he been found innocent, and the
people, to whom he appealed, absolved him, as Livy tells us, magis admiratione
virtutis quam lure caussae, "rather because of admiration of his valor than be-
cause of the justice of his cause." This order of judgments was necessary in the
times of Achilles, who measured all right by force, in virtue of that property
of the powerful described by Plautus with his usual elegance: factum non
pactum, non factum pactum "an agreement is no agreement, and no agreement
is an agreement" where promises are not fulfilled according to their proud
desires or where they themselves are not willing to keep their promises. So, in
332 THE NEW SCIENCE
order that they should not break out into disputes, quarrels and killings, it was
a counsel of providence that they should naturally adopt as their notion of
justice that precisely such and so much was their right as had been set forth in
solemn verbal formulae; whence the reputation of Roman jurisprudence and of
our own ancient [i.e. medieval] doctors lay in safeguarding their clients. This
natural law of heroic nations provided Plautus with plots for several comedies, in
which panders, through deceptions devised against them by young men enam-
ored of their slave girls, are unjustly defrauded of the girls by being innocently
found guilty under some legal formula, and not only are they unable to bring an
action for fraud, but one of them reimburses the deceitful youth for the price of
the slave, another begs another youth to be content with half the penalty he has
incurred for theft not proved by direct evidence, another flies the city for fear of
being convicted for having corrupted another's slave. Such was the reign of
natural equity in the judgments of Plautus's times!
967 Not only was this strict law naturally observed among men, but,
judging the gods from their own natures, men thought that they too observed it
in their oaths. So Homer relates that Juno swears to Jove, who is not only wit-
ness but also judge in the matter of oaths, that she had not urged Neptune to
rouse up a tempest against the Trojans, since the god Somnus had acted as her
intermediary, and Jove remains satisfied with her oath. So Mercury, disguised
as Sosia, swears to the real Sosia, "If I deceive you, let Mercury be against Sosia";
and we can hardly believe that it was Plautus's intention in the Amphitryon to
bring in the gods to teach perjury to the people in the theater. It is even less
credible in the case of Scipio Africanus and Laelius (who was called the Roman
Socrates), two most wise princes of the Roman republic with whose collabora-
tion Terence is said to have composed his comedies; yet in the Andna Davus
is represented as having the baby placed before Simo's door by the hands of
Mysis so that if perchance his master should ask him about it, he may with a
clear conscience deny having put it there.
968 But a very grave proof is the fact that in Athens, a city of discerning
and intelligent men, on hearing the verse of Euripides which Cicero rendered
in Latin: luravi lingua, mentern iniuratam habui "I swore with my tongue,
but my mind I kept unsworn" the spectators in the theater murmured in dis-
gust, for naturally they held the opinion that uti lingua nuncupassit, ita ius csto
"as the tongue has declared, so let it be binding" as the Law of the Twelve
Tables commanded, And what release could the unhappy Agamemnon find
from the rash vow in fulfilment of which he consecrated and slew his innocent
and pious daughter Iphigema? Hence we can understand how ingratitude to
providence led Lucretius impiously to exclaim upon this deed of Agamemnon:
Tantum religio potuit suaderc maloruml "So great were the evils religion
could prompt!" as we set forth above in the Axioms [191].
969 In final confirmation of our argument here, we adduce two certain
BOOK IV. THE COURSE OF NATIONS 323
facts from Roman history and jurisprudence: one, that it was in very late [re-
publican] times that Gallus Aquilius introduced the action de dolo; and the
other, that Augustus gave judges discretion to absolve those who had been
tricked or seduced.
970 Being used to this custom in peace, nations defeated in war, accord-
ing to the terms of surrender, either suffered miserable oppression or by good
fortune mocked the wrath of their conquerors.
971 Miserable oppression was the lot of the Carthaginians, who had
accepted the Roman peace under the provision that they would have left to
them life, their city and their substance. For they understood by the city its build-
ings, for which sense the Latin word is urbs, but the Romans had used the word
civitas, which means the community of citizens. So when in fulfilment of the
peace terms the Carthaginians were commanded to abandon their city on the
coast and retire inland, they refused to obey and took up their arms again in de-
fense. The Romans then declared them rebels, took Carthage and, by the heroic
law of war, barbarously set fire to it. The Carthaginians repudiated the terms of
peace granted them by the Romans, which they had not understood in negotiat-
ing them; for they had become intelligent before their time, partly through
African sharpness and partly through maritime trading which quickens the
wit of nations. But the Romans did not therefore consider that war unjust; for,
excepting a few who regard the Romans as having begun to wage unjust wars
with that against Numantia which was brought to an end by Scipio Africanus,
all agree that they began with the later one against Corinth.
972 A still better proof of what we are arguing is afforded by the returned
barbarian times. When the Emperor Conrad III dictated the terms of surrender to
Weinsberg, whose resistance had been fomented by his rival for the empire, he
specified that only the women should be allowed to come out of the city with
whatever they could carry away on their backs; whereupon the pious women
of Weinsberg came out carrying their children, husbands and fathers. The vic-
torious emperor stood before the city gate, in the very moment of triumph which
is naturally tempting to insolence, and yet restrained his anger (which is terrify-
ing in the great and must be most ominous when caused by impediments to
acquiring or retaining their sovereignty). While the army under his command
stood by with swords drawn and lances in rest, prepared to slaughter the men
of Weinsberg, he looked on and permitted all to pass safely by him whom he
had intended to put to the sword. So far was the natural law of the developed
human reason of Grotius, Selden and Pufendorf from being current by nature
through all times in all nations!
973 All that we have so far set forth, and all that we shall have to say
later, springs from the definitions we have laid down above in the Axioms [321,
324] concerning the truth and the certitude of laws and pacts; and [from the
fact] that the strict law observed in words, which is properly the fas gentium, is
324 THE NEW SCIENCE
as natural in barbarous times as that benign law is in human times which is
measured by the equal utility of causes, which should properly be called fas
naturae, the immutable law of rational humanity which is the true and proper
nature of man.
[CHAPTER IV]
[THIRD KIND: HUMAN JUDGMENTS]
974 The third kind of judgments are all extraordinary. In these the
governing consideration is the truth of the facts, to which, according to the
dictates of conscience, the laws benignly give aid when needed in everything
demanded by the equal utility of causes. These are all imbued with natural
modesty (which is the child of intelligence) and therefore guaranteed by good
faith (the daughter of humanity), which is appropriate to the openness of
popular commonwealths and much more to the generosity of monarchies,
wherein the monarchs, in these judgments, make it their pride to be above the
laws and subject pnly to God and their conscience. And from these judgments,
practiced in modern times during peace, have arisen the three systems of the
law of war which we owe to Grotius, Selden and Pufendorf. And Father
Nicola Concina, having observed many errors and defects in them, has con-
structed another system more in conformity with good philosophy and more
useful to human society. This system of his, to the glory of Italy, he still teaches
in the illustrious university of Padua, in addition to metaphysics, in which he
holds the principal chair.
[SECTION XI]
THREE SECTS OF TIMES
[CHAPTER I]
[SECTS OF RELIGIOUS, PUNCTILIOUS AND CIVIL TIMES]
975 All the aforesaid things have been practiced through three sects of
times.
976 The first was that of religious times which was observed under the
divine governments.
977 The second was that of the punctilious, like Achilles. In the returned
barbarian times it was that of the duellists.
978 The third was that of civil or modest times, the times of the natural
law of nations, which Ulpian, adding the specific epithet human, calls Jus
naturale gentium humanarum. Hence the Latin writers under the emperors
call the duty of subjects officium civile, and every offense against natural equity
in the interpretation of the laws is called incivile. It is the last sect of times in
Roman jurisprudence, beginning with the time of popular liberty. Hence the
praetors, to accommodate the laws to the Roman nature, customs and govern-
ment, which had now suffered change, had first of all to soften the severity and
temper the rigidity of the Law of the Twelve Tables, which had been decreed
when it was natural in the heroic times of Rome. And later the emperors had to
remove all the veils in which the praetors had cloaked it and reveal natural equity
in all the openness and generosity which was appropriate to the gentleness to
which the nations had become accustomed.
979 The jurisconsults accordingly justify their views as to what is just by
appealing to the sect of their times, as we may observe. For these [three sects of
times] are the proper sects of Roman jurisprudence, in which the Romans con-
curred with all other nations of the world; sects taught them by divine provi-
dence, which the Roman jurisconsults set up as the principle of the natural law
of nations; and not the sects of the philosophers, which some learned interpreters
of Roman law have forcibly intruded therein, as we have said above in the
326 THE NEW SCIENCE
Axioms [326-329?]. And the emperors, when they wish to give a reason for
their laws or for other orders issued by them, say that they have been guided by
the sect of their times, as in the passages collected by Barnabe Brisson in his
De joi'mulis et solemnibus populi Romani vcrbis. For the customs of the age are
the school of princes, to use the term [saeculum, age] applied by Tacitus to the
decayed sect of his own times, where he says corrumpere et corrumpi seculum
vocatur "they call it the spirit of the age to corrupt and to be corrupted" or, as
we would now say, the fashion.
[SECTION XII]
OTHER PROOFS DRAWN FROM THE PROPERTIES
OF THE HEROIC ARISTOCRACIES
[INTRODUCTION]
980 Such a constant and perpetual orderly succession of civil human
things, within the strong chain of so many and such various causes and effects as
we have observed in the course taken by the nations, should constrain our minds
to receive the truth of these principles. But, in order to leave no room for doubt,
we shall add the explanation of other civil phenomena which can be explained
only by the discovery, made above, of the heroic commonwealths.
[CHAPTER I]
THE SAFEGUARDING OF THE FRONTIERS
981 The two greatest eternal properties of the aristocratic common-
wealths, as we have said above, are the guarding of the frontiers and the guard-
ing of the orders.
982 The guarding of the frontiers began to be observed, as we have seen
above, by bloody religions under the divine governments, for it was necessary to
set up boundaries to the fields in order to put a stop to the infamous sharing of
things in the bestial state. On these boundaries were to be fixed the frontiers
first of families, then of clans or houses, later of peoples, and finally of nations.
Hence the giants, as Polyphemus tells Ulysses, lived separately, each in his own
cave with his wife and children, and did not meddle in one another's affairs,
thus following the habits of their recent savage origin; and they savagely slew
any who entered within their boundaries, as Polyphemus attempted to slay
Ulysses and his companions. (In this giant, as we have remarked several times,
328 . THE NEW SCIENCE
Plato discerns the fathers in the state of the families.) From this, as we showed
above, the custom was derived whereby the cities for a long period of time looked
upon each other as enemies, So much for the harmonious division of the fields
described by Hermogcnianus the jurisconsult and received in good faith by all
interpreters of Roman law. From this first and most ancient principle of human
things, with which its subject matter began, it would be reasonable to begin
also the doctrine which teaches DC rcrum divisione et acquircndo carum domi-
nio "Of the classification of things and of acquiring ownership of them."
This guarding of the frontiers is naturally practiced in the aristocratic common-
wealths, which, as political writers point out, are not established by conquest.
But later, when the infamous communism of things had ceased and the bound-
aries of the peoples were well fixed, came the popular commonwealths which
are made for the expansion of empires, and finally the monarchies which are
even more efficient in that respect.
983 This and no other must be the reason why the Law of the Twelve
Tables did not recognize simple possession, and usucapion in heroic times
served to solemnize natural transfers, the best interpreters defining it as dominii
adicctio, the addition of civil ownership to the natural ownership previously
acquired. But afterwards in the time of popular liberty the praetors came to the
assistance of bare possession with the interdicts, and usucapion began to be
dominii adeptio^a. way of acquiring civil ownership from the beginning; and
while at first cases of possession did not come up for judgment because the
praetor took extrajudicial cognizance of them, in accordance with what we
have said on the subject above, today the most certain judgments are those
called possessory.
984 Thus there came about in the period of popular liberty at Rome a
fading, and under the monarchy a complete disappearance, of the distinction
between bonitary, quiritary, optimum and civil ownership. Originally these
terms carried meanings very different from their present ones. The first meant
natural ownership, maintained by perpetual physical possession. The second
meant ownership that could be vindicated; it was current among the plebeians,
having been extended to them by the nobles in the Law of the Twelve Tables,
but a plebeian could vindicate it only by calling in as auctor the noble from
whom he had acquired title, as we have fully shown above. The third meant
ownership free of any encumbrance public or private; it was enjoyed by the
patricians among themselves before the establishment of the census which was
the basis of popular liberty, as we have said above. The fourth and last meant
the ownership belonging to the cities themselves, which today is called eminent
domain. The difference between optimum and quiritary ownership had already
been obscured in the times of liberty, so that the jurisconsults of the latest period
took no account of it. But under the monarchy what is called bonitary ownership
(born of bare natural transfer) and the so-called quiritary ownership (born of
mancipation or civil conveyance) were quite confused by Justinian in the con-
BOOK IV. THE COURSE OF NATIONS 329
stitutions De nudo lure qulritium tollendo and De usucapione trans]ormanda,
and the famous distinction between res mancifi and res nee mancipi was com-
pletely obliterated. There remained civil ownership in the sense of ownership
yielding an action of ret vindicatio, and optimum ownership in the sense of
ownership not subject to any private encumbrance.
[CHAPTER II]
THE SAFEGUARDING OF THE ORDERS
985 The guarding of the orders began in divine times from jealousy (the
jealousy of Juno, the goddess of solemn matrimony, as noted above) with a view
to the certainty of the families as against the nefarious communism of women.
Such vigilance is a natural property of the aristocratic commonwealths, desirous
of keeping family relationships, successions, and consequently wealth and
through it power, within the order of the nobles. On this account testamentary
laws were late in appearing among the nations. (Tacitus says that there was no
testament among the ancient Germans.) This is the reason why, when King Agis
tried to introduce such laws at Sparta, he was strangled by command of the
ephors, the custodians of the liberty of the Lacedaemonian nobles, as we have
already stated. We may understand from this with how much discernment the
embellishers of the Law of the Twelve Tables fixed in the eleventh table the
article Ausplcia incommunicata flebt sunto "Let the auspices be withheld
from the plebs" for on these originally depended all civil rights both public
and private, which were thus all kept within the order of the nobles. The private
rights were solemn matrimony, paternal power, heredes sui, agnates, gentiles,
legitimate succession, testaments and guardianships, as we have set forth above.
Thus, after having extended all these rights to the plebs in the first table and
thereby established the laws proper to a popular commonwealth, and particularly
the testamentary law, they proceed by a single article in the eleventh table to
give it a completely aristocratic form. However, in such confusion of things they
say this too, which, though a guess on their part, is true: that in the last two
tables some ancient customs of the Romans passed into law. This statement
verifies the aristocratic nature of the ancient Roman state.
986 Now, to come back to the subject, when the human race was every-
where settled by the solemnizing of matrimony, there appeared the popular
commonwealths, and much later the monarchies. In these, as a result of inter-
marriage with the plebs of the peoples and as a result of testamentary successions,
the orders of the nobility were disorganized, and so, little by little, wealth began
to pass from the noble houses. For it has been fully shown above that the Roman
330 THE NEW SCIENCE
plebeians contracted only natural marriages down to the 309th year of Rome,
when they finally obtained from the patricians the grant of connubium or the
right of contracting solemn nuptials; nor in their miserable state, like that of
abject slaves as Roman history represents it to us, could they have made any pre-
tension to intermarriage with the nobles. This is one of the most important
considerations which led us to say in the first edition of this work that unless we
assign these principles to Roman jurisprudence, Roman history is more incredible
than the fabulous 'history of the Greeks, as it has hitherto been related to us.
For we could not understand what the latter meant, but we feel instinctively
that the former is in direct opposition to the order of human desires. For it
shows us men of the basest condition aspiring first to nobility in the struggle
over connubium, then to honors in the struggle for the consulate, and finally to
wealth by laying claim to the high priesthood; whereas, by the eternal common
civil nature, men first seek wealth, then honors, and lastly nobility.
987 Thus we are compelled to say that, when the plebeians had won
from the nobles the certain ownership of the fields by the Law of the Twelve
Tables (which we showed above to be the second agrarian law of the world), as
they were still strangers (for such ownership can be granted to strangers), they
learned by experience that they could not leave their fields intestate to their kin,
for, as they could not contract solemn matrimony, they had no heredes sui,
agnates or gentiles; much less could they dispose of them by testament, as they
were not citizens. And there is no reason to wonder at this, since they were men
of little or no intelligence, as is evident from the Furian, Voconian and Falcidian
laws, which were all plebiscites; for it took all three of them in order that by
the Falcidian law the desired end should finally be achieved, namely that estates
should not be absorbed by legacies. Because the plebeians perceived, in the case
of those of their number who died during the three years [following the Law
of the Twelve Tables], that the fields which had been assigned to them reverted
to the nobles by reason of the aforesaid disabilities, they laid claim to connubium
and thereby to citizenship, as we have explained above. But the grammarians,
confused by all the political writers who imagined Rome to have been founded
by Romulus with the form of government which cities now have, did not know
that the plebs of the heroic cities had been for several centuries considered as
foreigners and had therefore contracted only natural marriages among them-
selves. Hence they did not observe either the factual impropriety or the poor
Latinity of taking the historical phrase plebei tentarunt connubia patrum as if
it read cum patribus (after the manner of the marriage laws, such as: patruus
non habet cum jratris filia connubium), as we have noted above. For, if they had
noticed this, they would certainly have understood that the plebeians did not
claim the right of intermarrying with the nobles, but the right, which belonged
to the nobles, of contracting solemn nuptials.
988 Hence, if we consider legitimate successions as determined by the
Law of the Twelve Tables that the deceased father of a family should be sue-
BOOK IV. THE COURSE OF NATIONS 331
ceeded in the first place by heredes sui, in their default by his agnates, and in
defect of these by his gentiles the Law of the Twelve Tables will seem to have
been precisely a Salic Law of the Romans. This law was also observed by Ger-
many in its earliest times (whence we may assume the like for the other first
nations of the returned barbarism), and it finally survived in France and Savoy.
Baldus, quite agreeably to our thesis, calls this law of succession ius gentium Gal-
lorum. By the same token, the Roman law of agnate and gentile successions
may rightfully be called ius gentium romanarum, with the addition of the
epithet heroicarum, and, to put it more properly, romanum. This would be pre-
cisely the ius quirttium romanorum which we showed above to have been the
natural law common to all the heroic nations.
989 What we have said here about the Salic Law, so far as it excludes
women from the royal succession, is not, as may appear, contradicted by the state-
ment that Tanaquil, a woman, governed the Roman kingdom. For that was a
heroic phrase to describe a weak-spirited king who allowed himself to be domi-
nated by the crafty Servius Tullius, who invaded the Roman kingdom with the
favor of the plebs, on whom he had bestowed the first agrarian law, as shown
above. A parallel to the Tanaquil story, with the same heroic manner of speak-
ing, occurred in the returned barbarian times when Pope John was called a
woman (against which fable Leo Allacci wrote an entire book) because of the
great weakness he showed in yielding to Photius, patriarch of Constantinople,
as pointed out by Baronio and after him by de Sponde.
990 Having resolved this difficulty, we may now state that in the same
way as the phrase ius quirttium romanorum had first been used in the sense of
ius naturale gentium heroicarum romanarum, just so, when Ulpian under the
emperors defines the law current in the free commonwealths and much more
under the monarchies, he calls it, weighing his words, ius naturale gentium
humanarum. And in view of all this the title in the Institutes [1.2: De lure na-
turali, gentium, et civili] ought to read, it would seem, De jure naturali gentium
civili, not only removing with Hermann Vulteius the comma between naturali
and gentium (and with Ulpian supplying humanarum in place of the second
comma), but suppressing as well the particle et before civili. For the Romans
must have had reference to their own law as they had preserved it from the time
of its introduction in the age of Saturn, first by their customs and later by their
legislation, just as Varro in his great work Antiquitates rerum divmarum et
humanarum treated of Roman things with reference to their purely native
origins, with no admixture of anything foreign.
991 Now, returning to the Roman heroic successions, we have many
strong reasons for doubting that, in ancient Roman times, daughters were ex-
ceptions to the exclusion of women. For we have no reason to believe that the
hero fathers had any spark of tenderness, but rather many weighty ones to the
contrary. The Law of the Twelve Tables called an agnate as remote as the seventh
degree in order to exclude an emancipated son from succeeding to his father.
332 THE NEW SCIENCE
The family fathers had a sovereign right of life and death over their children
and hence a despotic dominion over the acquisitions of their sons. They con-
tracted alliances on behalf of their sons in order to bring into their houses women
worthy of the family. (This is evidenced by the verb spondere, which properly
means to promise for another, whence betrothals were called sponsalia.) They
regarded adoptions in the same light as marriages, as a means of reinforcing
decaying families by choosing scions from noble stocks. They regarded emanci-
pation as chastisement or punishment. They had no notion of legitimation,
since concubinage was practiced only with freed slaves and foreigners, with
whom in heroic times solemn matrimony could not be contracted lest the chil-
dren degenerate from the nobility of their sires. For the most frivolous reasons,
testaments were either null or nullified or broken or of no effect, in order to
clear the way for legitimate successions. To such an extent were they naturally
dazzled by the brightness of their own private names, whence they were nat-
urally inflamed for the glory of the common name of Roman! All these are
customs proper to aristocratic commonwealths such as the heroic common-
wealths were, and they are all properties in accord with the heroism of the
first peoples.
992 A matter worthy of reflection is this glaring error committed by the
erudite embellishers of the Law of the Twelve Tables who assert that it was
brought from Athens to Rome: namely that inheritances left intestate by
Roman family fathers, during all the time before that Law brought in testa-
mentary and legitimate successions, must have gone under the category of the
things called res nulltus. Providence, on the contrary, in order that the world
should not relapse into the infamous communism of things, ordained that the
certainty of ownership should be preserved by and through the very form of
the aristocratic commonwealths. Hence legitimate successions must naturally
have been observed by all the first nations before they had any notion of testa-
ments, which are proper to the popular commonwealths and much more to the
monarchies, as indeed Tacitus clearly tells us was the case among the ancient
Germans (whose practice gives us reason to assume the same of all the first
barbarous peoples). This was the basis for the conjecture we have just made
that the Salic Law, which was certainly observed in Germany, was observed
universally by the nations in the time of the second barbarism.
993 However, the jurisconsults of the last [period of Roman] juris-
prudence, by estimating the things of the unknown earliest times by those of
their own quite late times, which is the source of innumerable errors noted in
this work, believed that the Law of the Twelve Tables had called the daughters
of families to the inheritances of their fathers who had died intestate, in virtue
of the word suus [in the phrase sui heredes], following the rule that the mascu-
line gender includes women also. But heroic jurisprudence, of which we have
had so much to say in this work, took the words of the laws in their strictest
meaning, so that the word suus meant only the son of a family. Invincible proof
BOOK IV. THE COURSE OF NATIONS 333
of this is afforded by the formula for the institution of posthumous children,
introduced many centuries later by Callus Aquihus, which is phrased Si quis
natus natavc erit, lest from the word natus alone it should not be understood
that a posthumous daughter is included. Because of his ignorance of these
matters, Justinian in the Institutes affirms that the Law of the Twelve Tables by
the use of the word adgnatus had called male and female agnates alike, but that
later the middle jurisprudence had made the law more rigid by restricting it
to sisters of the same blood. Thus by chance and yet happily this jurisprudence
came to be called middle for the reason that, beginning with these cases, it
mitigated the rigors of the Law of the Twelve Tables, whereas the ancient juris-
prudence which preceded it had guarded its words with the greatest scrupulous-
ness. Both have been fully described above.
994 But when sovereignty had passed from the nobles to the people,
since for the plebs all its strength, wealth and power depends on the multitude
of its children, the tenderness of blood ties began to make itself felt. Before
that the plebeians of the heroic cities cannot have had this feeling, for they
generated children to make them slaves of the nobles, by whom indeed they
were bidden to propagate at such a time as would result in springtime births
so that the young would be born not only healthy but robust. (Hence they were
called vernae, as the Latin etymologists tell us, and from this name, as we said
above, the vulgar tongues were called vernaculae.) The mothers must have hated
rather than loved their children, for they had only the pain of bearing and
the trouble of nursing them, without having from them any joy or profit. But
the multitude of the plebeians, while it had been dangerous to the aristocratic
commonwealths, which are and profess to be the property of the few, added to
the greatness of the popular commonwealths and much more to that of the
monarchies (which is why the imperial laws are so favorably disposed to women
because of the dangers and pains of childbirth). Hence from the times of popular
liberty the praetors began to consider the rights of blood and to satisfy them
by means of the bonorum possessions. They began with their remedies to repair
the faults and shortcomings of testaments in order to facilitate the diffusion of
wealth, which alone is admired by the vulgar.
995 Finally came the emperors, who, taking umbrage at the splendor of
the nobles, devoted themselves to promoting the rights of human nature, com-
mon to plebeian and noble alike. This began with Augustus, who bent his efforts
to the protection of trusteeships (by which formerly property had passed to per-
sons incapable of inheritance thanks only to the conscientiousness of the injured
heirs) and gave them such great assistance that within his lifetime he endowed
them with legal compulsion, obliging the heirs to give effect to them. A great
many senatusconsulta followed which placed cognates on a level with agnates.
Finally Justinian abolished the distinction between legacies and trusteeships,
merged the Falcidian [i.e. Pegasian] fourth [part of an estate reserved to the
heir] with the Trebellian, minimized the distinction between testaments and
334 THE NEW SCIENCE
codicils, and put agnates and cognates on precisely the same footing as regards
inheritance ab intestato. And the latest Roman laws went to such lengths in
favor of last wills that, whereas in ancient times they were declared invalid on
the slightest pretext, nowadays they must always be interpreted in such a way
as to favor their validity.
996 Because of the humanity of the times (as displayed in the affection
of popular commonwealths for their sons and the desire of monarchies to see
fathers devoted to their sons), since the cyclopean authority of the family fathers
over the persons of their children had already vanished, the emperors sought to
do away also with the authority they still had over their acquisitions, To this
end, they introduced first the peculium castrense to attract young men to war,
then extended it to the peculium quasi castrense to attract them to the imperial
service, and finally, to satisfy the sons who were neither soldiers nor clerks, in-
troduced the peculium adventitium. They deprived the paternal power of its
influence over adoptions, now no longer restricted to a few close relations. They
universally encouraged formal adoptions (adrogationes), which were somewhat
difficult in that citizens who were family fathers in their own right thereby be-
came 
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